Metric Dimensions of March Madness Brackets

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Authors: Sam Spiro
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Say you and some friends decide to make brackets for March Madness and are told how each of your brackets scored. The question we ask is: when can you determine how the actual tournament went given your scores? We determine the exact minimum number of brackets needed to do this for any March Madness-style tournament regardless of the scoring system used, and more generally we prove effective bounds for the problem for arbitrary single-elimination tournaments.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Sports Analytics and Performance Advanced Combinatorial Mathematics Advanced Graph Theory Research

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
6 February 2026
Document type
Preprint