年
Amid a bleak season for New York Yankees fans, science offers
some solace -- the wrong team, the Florida Marlins, beat them
in 2003's World Series, finds a study.
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"The world of sports provides an ideal laboratory for modeling
competition because game data are accurate, abundant, and accessible,"
answers the study in the journal Physical Review E. "Even after
a long series of competitions, the best team does not always
finish first."
READ THE STUDY: Efficiency of competitions
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LAB: Randomness in competitions
The problem, say study authors Eli Ben-Naim and Nick Hengartner
of the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, is that the baseball
season, at a mere 162 games, is too short. Instead, the number
of games that would keep a lucky-but-lousy team from dethroning
a statistically superior team is 265.
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The study authors, who specialize in studying random behavior in
complex materials, plugged the odds of low-seed teams beating
high-seed ones, 44% in baseball over the last century, into a
mathematical model of a typical season.
The more games played, the better the chances that the higher
seeded teams will become champions, according to the study.
And it becomes less likely that a weak team will weasel its
way to the top.
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But to ensure that the best Major League Baseball team wins,
a longer World Series, say 11 games, would be mathematically
appropriate. "The same is true for other competitions in arts,
science and politics," write the study authors.
A more efficient competitive process would be to schedule a
preliminary series of competitions to cull the obviously bad
teams, and then follow with a longer season devoted to only
the good ones.
"In real life, we have to compete all the time, rank people,
rank proposals and other things," Ben-Naim says. The study
suggests a more efficient approach in such cases would be to
throw out the worst competitors immediately and "spend all
your energy evaluating only the few obviously best ones."
Tough luck for the Marlins in that case. Statistics indicate
they were the worst team in 30 years to win a World Series,
say the authors.
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