Warren Buffett, America's second-richest man after Bill Gates, is teaming up with Quicken Loans to offer $1 billion to anyone who fills out a perfect 2014 Men's NCAA Tournament bracket.
"We've seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth? We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat," Jay Farner, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Quicken Loans, said in a statement.
You know why a lot of contests offer a million dollars for putting together a good bracket? Because it's nearly impossible. And putting together a perfect bracket is impossible. There are 64 teams in the tournament. That means 63 games, because one team doesn't lose. That means the possible number of outcomes is two to the power of 63, which equals 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes. Unless you have access to some advanced sabermetrics and a heck of a lot of free time, you basically have a one in 9.2 quintillion chance of winning. (If you really know your stuff, you could reduce the odds to something like one in 128 billion, accorinding to DePaul professor Jeff Bergen, who explains this in a really cool YouTube video called Odds of a perfect NCAA Basketball Bracket.)
To be sure, $100,000 be awarded to the contest's 20 most accurate "imperfect" brackets. But considering that it can take all evening to fill out a bracket, and since time is money, you're probably better off taking a stroll down to the corner store and blowing $2 on Powerball.
So Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans will have to shell out a few hundred grand for good PR. What else Quicken Loans get out of this? We don't know. But we'll leave you with this extract from a story in Computerworld: "We were starting to focus on big data derived from social media — Twitter, Facebook, Web tracking, Web chats" — a massive amount of unstructured data, explains [Quicken Loans] CIO Linglong He. "How to store that data is i
