That’s right, we’re getting ready for the battle to choose the ultimate seminar speaker. Paul Davidson, who sent in the image below, writes:
Knocked together in Excel. I’m European, so I may not have respected the North American system for brackets i.e. I split each category into seeded pools and randomly drew from them. The French Intellectuals get a bit of a rough draw in this regard with a lot of early matchups.
I take back all the bad things I ever said about Excel, as this image looks pretty good. Sure, the font is pretty unreadable, but other than that it looks cool.
I just feel bad for Plato, having to go up against Henny Youngman in the very first round, followed by a probable Mark Twain if he can get past Henny. The philosopher-king has a tough road to the Final Four.
The pairings will start on 3 Feb, so get your witticisms ready now!
Hey, I just noticed that Tolstoy is up against Jesus in the first round. Tough pairing, Leo!
I was hoping Jesus would be paired with “The guy who did Piss Christ.” Which reminds me that when I was a graduate student, we would wonder who would win if various pairs of faculty were to (physically) fight one another, and which would be the closest matches. We never made up a bracket for this, though…
On that note, “faculty were to (physically) fight one another”, how many would have bet on RA Fisher in his scuffle with a Cambridge University staff member, who was a professional prise fighter, that Fisher would have won by a knock out?
I once talked to Fisher’s son and tried without much success to discovered what training his father had in boxing – the only thing that he could recall was his father insisting that his mother regularly throw a medicine ball at him (often a part of a boxer’s training.)
OK, maybe only Phil will find this interesting.
Yeah but to get that right must have been a lot of work in Excel. All manual tinkering n moving about lines & connectors I suppose?
It wasn’t too bad time-wise. I can say it was definitely <25 mins as that's all the time I had, whether completed or not:
1) Cut-and-paste the candidates off the website into column C
2) Fill column A as A-H eight times and column B as Rand()
3) Sort by A&B to get seeded pots
4) Re-number column A as 1-64, and delete column B
5) Fill out pairs as 1v64, 2v63 etc. then draw the bracket-tree with outline borders. I used http://www.printyourbrackets.com/64seeded.html to get the pairings quickly.
6) Use a vlookup to match the candidates to the draw
7) Tidy up the bracket by removing unnecessary box-borders and picking a font that is unreadable when converted to a picture (Segoe UI for the curious)
8) Email it across, forgetting to sign it.
All steps are <2 minutes, except step 5, which probably took about 10 mins. Time constraint meant I couldn't search how US brackets would be done, so I assumed tennis format would apply. Unintended consequence is that unseeded teams got ranked 5-8 too, so all of the wild-cards (I'm guessing) ended up facing #1 seeds. If I was to draw again, I'd do a 2-step random sorting; one for the seeds as above, and then a second for the non-seeds, pooling them by field. But as it's a straight knock-out, I hope it's an alright assumption to have made.
How the hell did Thomas Kincade make the bracket? He’s the equivalent of a 6-19 team that somehow manages to win their conference championship and thereby get an automatic tournament berth. That stated, there are a lot of good pairings there.
(Related reading – http://www.usatoday.com/story/gameon/2013/03/19/worst-teams-ncaa-tournament-history/2000493/)
Too late now, but no Michael Faraday, Richard Feynman, Hans Rosling or Bassam Shakhashiri?
Eli:
You’re telling me! I’m still kicking myself for not including Richard Stallman, John McCarthy, and Linux Torvalds.
No reason not to have another bracket next year, with all the worthies left off this year’s list.
And the unworthies. We could probably make a bracket of 64, just using people we’ve mocked here on the blog, over the years.