Moore’s Law Will Kill the NCAA Bracket Challenge

When you’ll be able to generate every possible bracket on your laptop

Photo by Todd Greene on Unsplash

ONE BILLION DOLLARS. That is how much Warren Buffett offered in 2014 to anyone who could fill out a perfect bracket for March Madness. How much did people need to pay for a chance of joining the 3 comma club? Nothing, nothing at all. Was there a maximum number of entries? Also no. (1 per yahoo email address. But it’s free to create as many emails as you want)

Dr. Evil looks a lot like Jeff Bezos now that I think about it. Source: Giphy.

Free money you might be thinking, right? Why not set up a computer to fill out every possible bracket? Not so fast…

There are almost 10 Quintillion possible brackets!

Here is the math for how long it would take to automate filling all of these out. Hint: Super, duper long.

• There are 125 decisions to be made for each NCAA bracket.
• A MacBook Pro 15 inch has 2.6 GHz clock frequency.
• This means we can fill out 20.8 Million brackets per second.
• With 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible brackets it would take 443,431,347,926 seconds to compute all of them.
• So Drumroll Please… 5,132,307 days for a MacBook Pro today to fill out all possible NCAA brackets. So if we started right now, we wouldn’t be done until the year 16080.

What about Moore’s Law? When will bracket challenges become obsolete?

For the last 50 years, transistor density and computer speed have doubled every 18 months. (There is some argument that this might be ending/slowing soon, but we have had this scare before only to find another breakthrough). So the question is, how many times do we need to double computer speed in order to compute all possible brackets in a reasonable amount of time?

• To generate all 10 quintillion in a day should be possible in 33 years
• In just 7 years after that, we should be able to do it all in 1 hour on a personal computer.
• Side note: The amount of data it would take to store all these would be 1 Zettabyte or 1 trillion gigabytes. To put that in context, that is equivalent to the total amount of data exchanged over the internet in the year 2016. Luckily data storage improvements also follow Moore’s law and innovations like DNA storage should render this a non-issue by then.

So enter an online bracket challenge while you can. They might not exist in a few decades.

Or at least they won’t be free to enter.

Shoutout to Emily Herron for writing this with me.

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