Monday, March 31, 2025

Boosting busts more seeds in bigger tourneys

Instead of four teams, now there are $2^6$, or $64,$ seeded from $1$ through $64$. The power index of each team is equal to $65$ minus that team’s seed.

The teams play in a traditional seeded tournament format. That is, in the first round, the sum of opponents’ seeds is $2^6+1,$ or $65.$ If the stronger team always advances, then the sum of opponents’ seeds in the second round is $2^5+1$, or $33$, and so on.

Once again, the underdog in every match gets a power index boost $B$, where $B$ is some positive non-integer. Depending on the value of $B,$ different teams will win the tournament. Of the $64$ teams, how many can never win, regardless of the value of $B$?

After setting up the $64$ team bracket, we can choose various values for $B$ and then compute the winners directly. Since the outcome will remain the same for all non-integer values in $(\lfloor B \rfloor, \lceil B \rceil)$, we need only select a total of $64$ values, e.g., $b+0.5,$ for $b = 0, 1, \dots, 63.$ The summary of the outcomes of the $64$ team tournament bracket are in the table below. We note that there are $27$ seeds (namely, $7$, $13$-$15$, and $25$-$47$) who never win the tournament. Most unlucky out of each of them are $7$, $15$ and $47$, each of which have sets of $B$ of measure $3$ for which they will end up the runner up of the tournament, though they will never win it.

$B$ Winning Seed Runner Up
(0,1) 1 2
(1,2) 1 3
(2,3) 3 1
(3,4) 2 1
(4,5) 6 5
(5,6) 5 3
(6,7) 5 3
(7,8) 4 3
(8,9) 12 11
(9,10) 11 9
(10,11) 11 9
(11,12) 10 9
(12,13) 10 9
(13,14) 9 7
(14,15) 9 7
(15,16) 8 7
(16,17) 24 23
(17,18) 23 21
(18,19) 23 21
(19,20) 22 21
(20,21) 22 21
(21,22) 21 19
(22,23) 21 19
(23,24) 20 19
(24,25) 20 19
(25,26) 19 17
(26,27) 19 17
(27,28) 18 17
(28,29) 18 17
(29,30) 17 15
(30,31) 17 15
(31,32) 16 15
(32,33) 48 47
(33,34) 49 47
(34,35) 49 47
(35,36) 50 49
(36,37) 50 49
(37,38) 51 49
(38,39) 51 49
(39,40) 52 51
(40,41) 52 51
(41,42) 53 51
(42,43) 53 51
(43,44) 54 53
(44,45) 54 53
(45,46) 55 53
(46,47) 55 53
(47,48) 56 55
(48,49) 56 55
(49,50) 57 55
(50,51) 57 55
(51,52) 58 57
(52,53) 58 57
(53,54) 59 57
(54,55) 59 57
(55,56) 60 59
(56,57) 60 59
(57,58) 61 59
(58,59) 61 59
(59,60) 62 61
(60,61) 62 61
(61,62) 63 61
(62,63) 63 61
$\gt 63$ 64 63

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