Help us, HAL 9000, you’re our only hope
It’s ironic that computers run on binary code, because it’s us humans who tend to see things as either ones or zeroes. Deciding a moral issue? Pick right or wrong. A political one? Pick Democrat or Republican. An athletic one? Pick win or loss.
Those who want to skitter between two absolutes usually find themselves traveling a road bumpier than Madison St. after a Pineapple Express. Recently, in morality, Jack Kevorkian. Lately, in politics, Barack Obama. And now, in basketball, the University of Washington Huskies.
The humans who cast votes in the Associated Press national basketball poll look at the Huskies and see they’ve lost three, won six. They therefore do not consider Washington one of the top 25 teams in the country.
But computers see shades of gray. They note that the three teams who’ve beaten the Huskies are among the nation’s best. That those three losses were by a combined 13 points. And that, in their six wins, the Huskies have beaten their opponents by an average of 33 points.
So the two best-respected computer polls make a far different assessment than humans do. Ken Pomeroy’s computer rankings put Washington 7th in the country. Jeff Sagarin’s USA Today computer ranks the Dawgs 5th (look in the “predictor” column, which accounts for margin of victory).
Of course it’s not “computers” that make these rankings, it’s people who have programmed the computers. But they do so precisely to banish the indefensible preferences of the human mind from the multi-million-dollar business of prognosticating basketball games.
Vegas bookmakers pay more attention to computer rankings than wins and losses when making their picks. However, the people who matter to fans–the committee charged with seeding teams in the NCAA basketball tournament–see things in that traditional binary way. The RPI rating system they use does not consider margin of victory, only wins and losses. How dumb is this computer? It currently ranks Cal ahead of Washington. That’s Cal, with three double-digit losses.
Ken Pomeroy ranks Cal 81st in the nation. Sagarin ranks them 83rd. Even the poll voters don’t like the Bears–Washington, Arizona and Washington St. all got at least one poll vote, but Cal didn’t get any.
Having lost all three of their key non-conference games–no matter the scanty margin–Washington has probably destroyed their chances at winning one of the top four seeds in March’s NCAA Tournament, which would guarantee them a smoother path to their goal, the Final Four.
Meanwhile, the Huskies will keep plugging away, taking on and destroying lesser opponents like the University of San Francisco, which comes to town Saturday night, with little hope for an NCAA tourney bump. Unless our future computer overlords make their move in the next couple of months, that is.