{"82761":{"#nid":"82761","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Simulated Simians Pick Best Football Teams As Well As Pros","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EAccording to lore, during a debate in 1860, evolutionist and agnostic Thomas Huxley argued that six immortal monkeys working at six infallible typewriters given an unlimited supply of paper and ink one day could bang out the entire works of William Shakespeare.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ETricky? Absolutely. But it helped him defend his point at the time, which was that it didn\u0027t take an omniscient and enigmatic God to create man -- only time and evolution.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ENow an undergraduate researcher in Georgia Tech\u0027s School of Mathematics - and his two faculty advisers - say that a team of monkeys tossing coins and picking their favorite football teams could come up with the same championship teams as the almost-omniscient and definitely enigmatic NCAA Division I-A Bowl Championship Series (BCS) ranking system.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EAnd they\u0027ve developed calculations that demonstrate it. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EGeorgia Tech junior Thomas Callaghan, working alongside Assistant Professor Peter Mucha and Visiting Assistant Professor Mason Porter, scratched his head while pouring over the befuddling BCS rankings this past summer and wondered: Could a bunch of monkeys rank the top Division I-A football teams at least as well as the expert coaches, professional sportswriters and complicated statistical ranking algorithms in the BCS system?\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EIt turns out that they can, at least in theory. Callaghan tested the hypothesis using simulated monkeys - the actual, mathematical term is \u0022random walkers\u0022 - and a list of the 117 teams playing in Division I-A.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022Each of our virtual monkeys got a single vote to cast for the best team in the nation, making their decision based on only one, simple guideline - they periodically look up the win-loss outcome of a single game played by their favorite team, and they flip a weighted coin to determine whether to change their allegiance to the other team when making their vote,\u0022 Callaghan said. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe \u0022weighted coin\u0022 is the key, Callaghan said. In this hypothesis, the monkey\u0027s coin toss is meant to imitate what happens in the real world, when there\u0027s a better-than-50-percent chance that the winning team -- say, \u0022heads\u0022-- is the better team. But the weighted coin toss also allows the losing team -- or \u0022tails,\u0022 with a less-than-50-percent chance of winning - to still be considered the better team by voters, thus regarding the game as an upset. The monkey simply casts its vote according to the outcome of the coin toss, Callaghan said.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThis system, of course, is far less complex than the labyrinthine BCS system, which looks at much more than a team\u0027s win-loss record. [\u003Cem\u003ESee details below\u003C\/em\u003E.]That system takes into account such things as the strength of an opposing team, when a game is played in a season, a team\u0027s poll averages and the sometimes-secretive computer rankings given to Division I-A teams by several formulas. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECallaghan\u0027s Monkey Ranking System, however, looks only at wins and losses. A monkey starts voting for a randomly chosen team in Division I-A. Then, the monkey meanders around a \u0022network\u0022 of the other teams, randomly changing his vote for his favorite team each time a game is played. Again, the monkey bases his vote decision on a weighted coin toss. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022We let the monkeys change their minds over and over again, but the total number of votes cast for each football team quickly stabilizes,\u0022 Mucha said. \u0022We thereby obtain rankings each week of the season and, at the end of the season, by looking at the fraction of monkeys that have voted for each team.\u0022 \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EUnder this system, winning a game is directly rewarded and the strength of a team\u0027s schedule is automatically incorporated into the rankings, because games played against highly ranked opponents lead to more monkeys inquiring about a team and making vote decisions based on the outcomes of those games. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe mathematicians took their system and compared the monkey rankings with the real rankings from the past 33 seasons of Division I-A football.  \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EIt turns out the monkeys do almost as well as the BCS system in picking the two teams that face off in the national championship. For example, at the end of the 2002 season, the monkeys picked Miami and Ohio State as the top two teams. In 2001, they picked Miami as the top team and, in 2000, they picked Oklahoma.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022Although an individual monkey never settles on an individual team, the collective behavior of all the monkeys after they all vote appears to give you a meaningful ranking of teams,\u0022 Mucha said. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022We\u0027re not statisticians. We don\u0027t know anything about statistics,\u0022 he said. \u0022I mean, there are just some real freakish football fans out there that really get into this, and we\u0027re just doing this as a fun research topic. But I think we\u0027ve proved our point.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EAnd that is?\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022One of the main things that comes up in this is its simplicity,\u0022 Mucha said. \u0022All our system does is take into account who beats who. Only by that, we come up with a ranking system that, in the end, is almost comparable to all the other systems used to rank teams today. All these other systems have all these arbitrary points of information. At the end of the day, if you take all that away, the monkeys often come up with the same championship competition.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe researchers are quick to point out, however, that they haven\u0027t come up with the best way to rank Division I-A football teams.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022Saying our system is better than the others - you\u0027re not going to win that argument,\u0022 Mucha said. \u0022This was about trying to make decisions in an environment where you have very little data. It has applications to many settings, especially in helping a student understand how to attack a problem with little data when you\u0027re forced to make a decision.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECallaghan is more succinct.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022I believe there should be a playoff system,\u0022 he said.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThis summer research experience was funded by the National Science Foundation through the three-year, $1.5 million VIGRE program, which aims to increase the number of Americans who pursue careers in the mathematical sciences. Porter\u0027s postdoctoral position at the Institute is another component of Georgia Tech\u0027s VIGRE award, which encourages research interactions with undergraduates like Callaghan.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022The projects are intended to involve students in the creative aspects of mathematics in a non-classroom setting, and they\u0027re also expected to enhance the development of student communication skills,\u0022 Porter said, adding that Callaghan\u0027s project did all those things while examining a topic of real interest to scientists and football fans. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022All of this monkey ranking actually comes from who plays who. The idea is that we spent time looking at this football network. But there are networks all over the place,\u0022 Porter said. \u0022You can look at networks in Congress, or when looking at the power grid and, of course, when you\u0027re talking about the Internet. Each of those represents a network of some kind. This is a timely topic and it\u0027s not going away. That\u0027s what makes it beautiful for Thomas to pursue as a research project.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EGary Schuster, dean of Georgia Tech\u0027s College of Sciences, said the VIGRE grant opportunities in the School of Mathematics are among the many undergraduate research options available to students throughout the Institute. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022This is one of the features that distinguishes Georgia Tech from many other universities,\u0022 Schuster said. \u0022Our faculty members are dedicated to advancement of knowledge in their fields, and students at Georgia Tech have the opportunity to work with a wide variety of the world\u0027s leading scientists on projects that lead to exciting and meaningful discovery.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECallaghan said he\u0027d heard about this research opportunity last year through Porter and Mucha, and it immediately caught his interest.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022[Mucha] told me about this idea and I said, \u0027Sign me up!\u0027 I just jumped on the project and started doing research on college ranking systems,\u0022 he said. \u0022There are statistical methodologies that are out there among sports enthusiasts and serious scientists, and there are all kinds of ranking systems employed.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ELooking at the Division I-A system, Callaghan said he quickly realized that it might fit into a mathematical study of networks and systems.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022There\u0027s information in that system. Given that - and the controversy over the rankings - we thought this would make a great exercise,\u0022 he said. \u0022As a result, I get a lot out of this by being able to look at real-world problems and elegant ways to address them using mathematics. For example, I got to learn how to use mathematical computer programs out of it, and I\u0027d had no experience with them before. I got very comfortable using them after this. I also had a chance to gain a better understanding of networks, discrete mathematics, applied mathematics - a whole range of topics.\u0022\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"An undergraduate researcher in Georgia Tech\u0027s School of Mathematics - and his two faculty advisers - say that a team of monkeys could come up with the same championship teams as the enigmatic NCAA Division I-A Bowl Championship Series ranking system.","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27304","created_gmt":"2003-11-20 01:00:00","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:02:02","author":"Matthew Nagel","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2003-11-18T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2003-11-18T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"82771":{"id":"82771","type":"image","title":"Callaghan, Porter \u0026 Mucha","body":null,"created":"1449178087","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:28:07","changed":"1475894700","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:45:00"},"82781":{"id":"82781","type":"image","title":"Go Jackets!","body":null,"created":"1449178087","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:28:07","changed":"1475894700","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:45:00"}},"media_ids":["82771","82781"],"related_links":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nsu\/031110\/031110-15.html","title":"Nature: Virtual Voters Pick Best Teams"},{"url":"http:\/\/www.footballfoundation.com\/bcs.php","title":"History and Overview of the BCS"},{"url":"http:\/\/www.footballfoundation.com\/","title":"The National Football Foundation"},{"url":"http:\/\/www.math.gatech.edu\/~mucha\/BCS\/","title":"The Monkey Ranking System Explained"},{"url":"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/PS_cache\/physics\/pdf\/0310\/0310148.pdf","title":"Thomas Callaghan Research Article"}],"groups":[{"id":"1214","name":"News Room"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EGeorgia Tech Media Relations\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELaura Diamond\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:laura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Elaura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E404-894-6016\u003Cbr \/\u003EJason Maderer\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:maderer@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Emaderer@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E404-660-2926\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["matthew.nagel@comm.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}