Question

In January 2014, the company Quicken Loans made news by announcing that it would pay $1 billion to the person who submitted the perfect NCAA bracket for the men's Division I tournament that year. The company bought an insurance policy from Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway to cover the cost of any prize money.Winning the $1 billion prize required a contestant to complete a bracket that predicted correctly the outcome of 63 games.Assume that everyone in the United States filled out many brackets and that all of the brackets produced in this way were different. (In fact, the contest was limited to 15 million entries altogether.) How many brackets would each person have to fill out to make sure that altogether all of the possible outcomes of the 63 games were represented? Use the fact that the population of the United States at this time was 317 million, and round your answer to the nearest billion. Note: You will need a calculator that can handle large numbers.

Answer 1

Answer:

63 games are played.

In the bracket at each stage of the game you have 2 choices.

so total 2^63 ways are there to fill out the bracket.

2^63 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 which is approx. 9.2 Quintillion.

Number of people in USA= 317,431,148.

So all possible outcomes of bracket filling to be represented, each person should fill out following number of brackets.

9,223,372,036,854,775,808

= -------------------------------------- = 29,056,291,718.6

317,431,148

which is approximately 29,056,291,719 brackets per person.

Explanation: