|
From USATODAY.com Tech - Top Stories:
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.
You may wonder, along with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, how this injustice could occur?
"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."
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.
"Baseball actually isn't doing too bad a job compared to other leagues," says Ben-Naim, a statistical physicist. "Probably the worst is the National Football League with only 16 games in a season."
Read the whole article
| 
Re: Physics Cries Foul in 2003 World Series
