Metric Dimensions of March Madness Brackets
Combinatorics
2026-02-09 v1 Discrete Mathematics
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.06950,
title = {Metric Dimensions of March Madness Brackets},
author = {Sam Spiro},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06950},
year = {2026}
}