Millions of Americans fill out NCAA March Madness brackets each year, hoping to correctly predict the winners of 63 college basketball games. The odds are stacked against them: there are over nine quintillion (9 followed by 18 zeros) possible bracket configurations, making a perfect bracket virtually impossible. But what if you didn’t need to create the perfect bracket—what if you could extract the actual tournament results from enough imperfect predictions?
Decoding Tournaments with Imperfect Data
Mathematician Sam Spiro at Georgia State University explored this idea, initially inspired by a fictional presidential fighting tournament. He wondered how much information is revealed when people submit brackets and receive scores based on their accuracy. The key insight is this: you don’t need perfection to deduce the outcome.
Spiro’s research demonstrates that in any single-elimination tournament with n teams, a carefully chosen set of n /2 brackets can guarantee you the actual results. For March Madness, this means that just 32 strategically selected brackets, once scored, would reveal every game’s winner. This holds true regardless of the scoring system, as long as correct predictions earn positive points.
The Limits of Collusion
What if your friends refuse to use the brackets you’ve designed? How many random brackets would you need to collect to always determine the tournament outcome? Spiro’s calculations show the answer is “very, very large”—somewhere between 8.9 quintillion and nine quintillion. That’s roughly one billion times the global population.
Why This Matters
This isn’t just a mathematical curiosity. It highlights how even incomplete data can contain hidden structures. In a world awash in predictions, scores, and rankings, these underlying patterns can reveal surprising truths. The study also demonstrates how seemingly chaotic systems—like a 64-team basketball tournament—can be remarkably deterministic given enough information.
“If they colluded, would this determine the whole thing?” Spiro asked himself. The answer is a resounding yes: given enough data, the outcome of even the most unpredictable events can be mathematically reconstructed.
In short, if you want to know how March Madness plays out, you could either watch the games or gather an impossibly large number of brackets from across the galaxy. The choice is yours.
