March Math-ness

A problem for the NCAA tournament:

There are 65 teams in the tournament. How many games are necessary to determine a champion?

In high school, this problem was presented to us by our psychology teacher. Nathan Horstman (voted “most likely to succeed”) and I (voted “most studious” and “most likely to become a millionaire”) worked together on this problem for five minutes before solving it. Had we been thinking, we would have solved it in five seconds… like the pot-heads in the back of the room had. I have no idea what point our teacher was trying to make by giving us that problem, but if the lesson was “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” then mission accomplished.

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