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Forum: General Stuff Topic: Something I did not know started by: thibodeaux Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 22 2010,16:58
If you have a single-elimination tournament with N (where N is any finite, positive non-zero integer) teams, how many total games will there be?I knew the answer for values of N that are powers of 2, but I didn't know the general answer. It's just not something that I ever thought about. Posted by TheCatt on Nov. 22 2010,18:03
It's like magic.
Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 22 2010,18:04
Yeah.
Posted by Malcolm on Nov. 22 2010,22:15
(thibodeaux @ Nov. 22 2010,18:58) QUOTE If you have a single-elimination tournament with N (where N is any finite, positive non-zero integer) teams, how many total games will there be? I knew the answer for values of N that are powers of 2, but I didn't know the general answer. It's just not something that I ever thought about. In general, n isn't a power of 2, people cheat the value to make it so using bye weeks or wildcard teams. Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 23 2010,04:51
Yeah, but it doesn't matter; you can do it without a power of 2.
Posted by TheCatt on Nov. 23 2010,06:28
(Malcolm @ Nov. 23 2010,01:15) QUOTE (thibodeaux @ Nov. 22 2010,18:58) QUOTE If you have a single-elimination tournament with N (where N is any finite, positive non-zero integer) teams, how many total games will there be? I knew the answer for values of N that are powers of 2, but I didn't know the general answer. It's just not something that I ever thought about. In general, n isn't a power of 2, people cheat the value to make it so using bye weeks or wildcard teams. It's not a cheat. It's just a fact. Posted by Malcolm on Nov. 23 2010,07:47
(thibodeaux @ Nov. 23 2010,06:51) QUOTE Yeah, but it doesn't matter; you can do it without a power of 2. Did you find/derive the general answer? I'm slightly curious. Posted by TheCatt on Nov. 23 2010,07:57
Ummm...
Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 23 2010,08:17
(Malcolm @ Nov. 23 2010,10:47) QUOTE (thibodeaux @ Nov. 23 2010,06:51) QUOTE Yeah, but it doesn't matter; you can do it without a power of 2. Did you find/derive the general answer? I'm slightly curious. Yep. If you have N teams, then you need N-1 games. You can confirm this by thinking of a tournament bracket as a binary tree. You have N leaf nodes (the teams). The games are the internal nodes. Consult wikipedia for the relationship between these two entities. Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 24 2010,16:01
The reason I mention this is that on Monday, and then again today, I interviewed a database-engineer who did not know the answer, not even for powers of 2.Today's guy actually did try to work through for 64 teams, and he wrote down and added up the powers of 2 from 1 to 32. While he was adding, I said to him, "you know, in binary that's all ones." Didn't help him. Posted by Malcolm on Nov. 24 2010,16:26
One of our contractors is getting let go because his SQL skills suck balls. Granted, he wasn't hired for that, he kind of got screwed into a bad position. But, come on, SQL is fucking rocket science. Dude didn't know what the "bit" data type was.I'm not looking forward to hiring any new members for our team because our hiring process is shyte. Management seems to have solved this problem just by letting manpower dwindle and refusing to hire anyone new. Posted by thibodeaux on Nov. 24 2010,16:41
(Malcolm @ Nov. 24 2010,19:26) QUOTE Management seems to have solved this problem just by letting manpower dwindle and refusing to hire anyone new. Sometimes you're actually better off that way. Everybody's busy, but at least you know they're competent (I mean, assuming it's the competent ones who are left). Posted by Malcolm on Nov. 24 2010,17:11
It's going to be a loooooooooooooooooong while before the real problem idiots are removed.
Posted by TheCatt on Nov. 24 2010,18:13
The other day, I was talking with one of my fellow DB people at work, and asked him what he thought datalength(13) was in t-sql... He said "2"Maybe he uses 3 bits to a byte. |