[QUOTE=ewmayer;363884]As long as you willingly let them steal you[sic] money, they will do so.[/QUOTE]

No shit, Sherlock.

[QUOTE=chalsall;363887]No shit, Sherlock.[/QUOTE]

Wrong thread, this seems extremely useful to me.

[QUOTE=Brian-E;364258]That's the thread titled "Posts that seem less useful, or something like that". Unfortunately it's locked, and only the favoured few have a key. I am quite proud, though, of having achieved two entries in it myself.[/QUOTE]

I wish I had one there too :sad:

[QUOTE=wombatman;364652]Thanks Pascal![/QUOTE]

Merely raising the bound on OPN's serves no useful purpose unless
there is some new mathematics accompanying the computation.

We already know that there are no small OPN's. Raising the bound does
not provide additional insight. It does nothing towards furthering a proof
that they do not exist.

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;364672]Merely raising the bound on OPN's serves no useful purpose unless
there is some new mathematics accompanying the computation.

We already know that there are no small OPN's. Raising the bound does
not provide additional insight. It does nothing towards furthering a proof
that they do not exist.[/QUOTE]

We already know your thoughts about OPN's so please don't disturb the discussion going on in here.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;364673]We already know your thoughts about OPN's so please don't disturb the discussion going on in here.[/QUOTE]

Oh? Trying to silence the opposition because you don't like what
they say is a very immature thing to do.

As long as people are free to post their views on this subject, so am I.

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;364675]Oh? Trying to silence the opposition because you don't like what
they say is a very immature thing to do.

As long as people are free to post their views on this subject, so am I.[/QUOTE]

I am just inviting you to step aside from this conversation due to the fact that we already know your thoughts and I am worried that a fight can be turned on as already happened for several occasions.

The Sochi Olympics are super-gay. ;)

[QUOTE=CRGreathouse;368915]Surely not that bad. I would expect that the best-ranked team would beat the bottom-ranked team with probability > 50.1%.[/QUOTE]
I bet a detailed analysis of past good guesses(like the top 1% of guesses) and a bit of statistical analysis(which I don't have the education to understand) would get us the actual probability.

I bet someone's actually done this and we just don't know who they are.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;368919]Surely there are lots of data from previous online NCAA tournament contests which could be meta-studied to

a) see what the resulting odds of a perfecto are, if >= 1 has occurred;

b) [if !a] get a more precise estimate of the actual odds, by comparing the frequency of "near misses" with that predicted by a naive coin-flip-style model. If such a model were still reasonable but one could bias the odds of each "flip" to (say) 0.6 using relative rankings and other common heuristics, the odds of a perfecto jump by nearly 100000.[/QUOTE]
D'OH should've read the posts first.

[QUOTE=ixfd64;368930]This could be used to search for evidence of ESP, particularly precognition.[/QUOTE]
There was a little kid last year who had a perfect bracket up until about the middle of the season. Maybe the reason it isn't totally perfect is that the teams heard about the kid and that was enough to throw off the predictions?

It was said he voted according to his favorite mascot in the pictures, but that could be added fluff. Or maybe he made that up to please people?