Pick the top 10 finishers in order? What are the odds of that?

Yeah, all the pick 'em contests are impossible. I'd rather they do away with the "$10 million dollar pick the exact top 3, in order, for 10 men's and 10 women's events" and just give the top 10 people with the best cumulative score letsrun.com t-shirts.

The odds are 1 in 4,532,385.

The odds are even better that wejo will not have to give anything away as the contest site is broken and has been so since inception really keeping down the number of people who can play. How's that for a world famous contest.

Good with figures wrote:

The odds are 1 in 4,532,385.

This assumes that everyone has an equal shot at placing in the top ten. From a pure statistics standpoint this is correct, but a more accurate method would be to take each runners seed times and determine odds that way.

Not perfect, but closer.

when is the deadline for entering your picks?

Where the f*** is Wejo gonna get 10 million dollars?

You can buy insurance policies for that...probably underwritten by Lloyd's of London.

There are two groups..."statistical" and "non-statistical"

In statical policies there is a known outcome with enough attempts. Simplest example is coin flip. In more complex statistical situations, these are written.

Non-statistical would be something like a hole-in-one or half-court shot contest. No real way to predict outcome, just like the trials. Again, lots of insurers write hole-in-one coverage (generally for the cost of the prize, such as a car).

If Wejo knows he can buy a policy for $200 and generate more page hits (say $300 worth) buy doing so, it makes economic sense.

*by* doing so

reminds me of this:

http://money.cnn.com/2003/04/09/news/companies/pepsi_billion_game/index.htm

Surprise! wrote:

Good with figures wrote:

The odds are 1 in 4,532,385.

This assumes that everyone has an equal shot at placing in the top ten. From a pure statistics standpoint this is correct, but a more accurate method would be to take each runners seed times and determine odds that way.

Not perfect, but closer.

Umm, I made this figure up out of thin air to be a smart ass. Imagine the odds that I picked the right number. Now THAT has got be long odds. Probably 1 in 6,894,455.

If everybody has an equal shot, the possible permutations of 10 from a field of 134, where order matters is 134!/124! which is about 1.3 x 10^21, within a couple of orders of magnitude of Avogadro's Number. Also note that wejo says "Just predict the top 10 perfectly and be the only one to do so" - so if the finish order is some marginally reasonable order that more than one person picked, he's safe.

Put it this way. You have a better chance of walking into the locker room at a gym and selecting a lock and guessing the 3 digit combination in your first try.

There are 1,731,874,467,807,840,000,000 different permutations for picking the top 10 runners given 133 entrants.

I like my chances on this one!

.............. wrote:

Put it this way. You have a better chance of walking into the locker room at a gym and selecting a lock and guessing the 3 digit combination in your first try.

Actually, you'd have better odds of walking into a locker room at a gym, selecting 1,000 locks and guessing the exact 3 digit combination on each one on the first try.

At least his contest doesn't include 5 non-particpants (Cabada, Fam, Rupp, AWebb, and Jorge Torres) out of 14 listed names, like the contest in RW:

http://www.runnersworld.com/cda/olympic/contest/1,7870,s6-239-399-0-0-0,00.html

They should have included Deena Kastor. She did run 2:19 in London '06. That'd be an A qualifier except for that little X Y thing.

"So you're telling me I got a chance!"

yeah wejo, you mean you are not going to make it easy to give us 100k?

a free fun thing and there is a chance (small, but there) to win 100k. yeah, that sucks. please.