This isn't your father's H2O2!!

Wow, this year caught up with me fast!  No changes this year for my yearly NCAA Auto-Picker, but I wanted to let you know what’s coming up in for next year:

• Choose your own Final Four!
  • I’ve been told that the key to a winning bracket is the ability to choose your own final four, and let a system like mine handle the lesser games.  I’m going to build this into my page very soon!
• Better rankings
  • Instead of relying solely on head-to-head ranking matchups,  I will be incorporating RPI and strength of schedule into the calculations.  We’ll see how this works out.

And now, read on for this year’s FAQ, gratuitously copied from last year’s!

What is it?

It’s a webpage that auto-generates a bracket for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament (also known as “March Madness”).

Why did you make this?

Picking a mediocre bracket is easy! For each game, pick the team with the lowest number (the lower seed, or the “better team”) as the winner. In later rounds, you might have equally-seeded teams up against one another (two #1 seeds might meet in the Final Four, for example). For those, you can either flip a coin or watch ESPN to get the conventional wisdom. However…every year there are teams that buck the conventional wisdom and beat teams with lower seeds. This makes it very very difficult to pick a GREAT bracket – one that will win your office tournament.I SUCK at picking great brackets, so I made this page to help figure out which upsets might be likely. Plus, I’m lazy…

How does it work?

Using a statistical snapshot of all of the modern tournaments, I can tell how often a lower-seeded team is upset by a higher-seeded team. In a geeky, Dungeons and Dragons kind of way, I roll a virtual die for each game, and based on the statistical history, choose a winner.

However, some upsets (#16 beating #1, for example) or some head-to-head matchups have NEVER happened! For those, I need to assign a probability that an upset will happen. I do this based on the seed difference. If a #16 seed plays a #1 seed, this is:

Difference = (HighSeed – LowSeed) = 16 – 1 = 15

You can see the probabilities used on the right-hand side of each bracket. These are fixed – although I would be willing to change them given some constructive commentary.

Hey! Your stupid page picked “insert lame team name here“!!!

Yup, it did. And next time, phrase your answer in the form of a question! Again, this is all based on statistics. If you don’t like how it picks, pick a new bracket (refresh your page) & it will pick another one for you. Alternatively you could program your own picker page with a better algorithm…or send me some email at scottkuma+picker [at] gmail.com with ideas, constructive criticism, etc.

You should probably know that every pick made by the page is logged…and each year I do some post-tournament statistical analysis to improve the page.

UPDATE!! — I’ve noticed in past years that in cases where there isn’t a lot of historical data, that it can become VERY easy for a poor seed to go a long way in the tournament.  For example, a 9 seed has played a 5 seed only once in the third round, and it won that game.  That means that in my pick system, that 9 seed would beat the 5 seed 99 times out of 100…not realistic at all.

What I’ve done this year to attempt to counter this type of “nerfing” is to go back to my static table (on the right side of the page) when there are fewer than 5 historical examples for each match-up.  In my testing, that seems to make things more realistic.  I will play with the threshold to try to optimize the formula.

I lost my office pool because I used your page!

Ok, if you use my page as your basis for betting your rent/mortgage payment, or any significant amount of money, I’m not responsible, and YOU ARE INSANE!! Besides, you probably would have lost anyways.

However, should you win a ton of money, I’d appreciate throwing a pittance my way…

CLICK HERE TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE AUTO-GENERATOR!

When Ubuntu’s newest version, Karmic Koala, came out, I was very dismayed to find that the distribution of the Pan newsreader available via the Synaptic package manager was broken.  Basically, any image that was posted as multi-part refused to load in the default window.

With some help from the folks on the pan-users mailing list, I was finally able to compile the code from a source repository being kept up by K.Haley, pan’s volunteer coder.  But I thought it might be nice to provide a step-by-step guide for newer linux users, as the whole process of downloading source from a github repository, the tracking down of the necessary development libraries, and the entire compilation process can be daunting.  Therefore, I came up with the following list of commands to run to get a patched version of Pan running from a normal install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

$ sudo apt-get install pan git git-core gnome-common libgtk2.0-dev libpcre3-dev libgmime-2.4-dev

This command is meant to be typed on a single line.  It will download quite a few libraries and a bunch of necessary programs & components.  It also installs the version of Pan included in Koala’s distribution streams, so that you will have the Ubuntu menu items already in place to run it easily.  When you’re done you should have everything you need to proceed.  Continue with the following:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir src
$ cd src
$ git clone git://github.com/lostcoder/pan2.git
$ cd pan2
$ sh ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME

You shouldn’t have any error messages during the autogen.  If you do, they’re likely due to missing programs or libraries needed to build the application.  Please post your error messages here!  If you didn’t receive any errors, type:

$ make

This will take a while…so go treat yourself to a coffee, soda or your preferred method of caffeine distribution.  (I might recommend a nice chai!) If the compile completes without incident, continue with:

$ make install
$ cd /usr/bin
$ ls pan

For safety’s sake, let’s back up pan so that we can restore the package maintainer’s version later…:

$ sudo mv pan pan.OLD

Now let’s keep on going:

$ sudo mv $HOME/bin/pan .
$ sudo chown root: pan

And you’re done! You should now be able to use the Pan icon located in the “Internet” section of your main Ubuntu menus to run your newly-compiled application.

Have fun!