March Madness is getting a really early start thanks to a challenge posed by the Oracle of Omaha. Warren Buffet is offering $1 billion to anyone who can correctly predict every single game in this year’s men’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament.

Think you have a shot? Think again says Olin prof Mark Soczek. The odds are difficult to comprehend.

“There are actually more than nine quintrillion possible outcomes for the tournament,” says Mark E. Soczek, PhD, senior lecturer in accounting and avid basketball fan.

To put it another way, Soczek says, for the every single person on the planet there are more than one billion possible outcomes.

Written out, nine quintillion looks like 9,000,000,000,000,000,000. It is one billion times more than nine billion.

– post by Neil Schoenherr

Photo Credit: Eric Wong, Flickr, CubesAndPiii