Python vs. Illinois
No, I'm not dead yet, I've just been hibernating. And by "hibernating", I mean "watching college basketball". As the geekier of you probably don't know, the Illinois men's basketball team just ended a dream season tonight with a loss to North Carolina in the NCAA tournament finals. Prior to tonight's loss, they only had one loss, on a buzzerbeater, to Ohio State."What in the world", I can hear you asking, "does that have to do with Python?" Well, on a college basketball board I frequent, a user named madurzak proved conclusively that the worst team, RPI-wise, in college basketball is better than Illinois:
Maryland Eastern Shore beat
MD Baltimore Country which beat
Maine who beat
Northeastern who had a nice win against
UMass who somehow beat
UConn who beat
Indiana who beat
Ohio St. who shocked
Illinois
This got me to wondering what some other teams' Illinois Number (as I christened it, after the famous Erdos Number) would be. Armed with Ken Pomeroy's ([1]) game data, Python, and a spare hour, I set out to find out. Would every team have an Illinois Number? What would the highest Illinois Number be?
To figure out, I simply built a tree with Illinois at the top, Ohio State below, the teams that beat Ohio State below that, and so on until all the games that fit into the tree had been properly placed. I've posted the basic code to construct the tree here; it requires the data I mentioned earlier. After some massaging of the results, I threw up a quick CGI app to explore them here.
Conclusion
There's no deep conclusion; I just thought it was a neat little script, so I wanted to post it. There are a few interesting thoughts I had on the data, though:
- The highest Illinois Number is 7, and it belongs to the little Division III squad of Hampden Sydney, an all-men's school in Virginia. They beat the Longwood Lancers, who managed only one win all season.
- Both Division I one-win teams, Army and the aforementioned Longwood, had Illinois Numbers of 6
- As far as I can tell, the only Division I school without an Illinois Number is lowly Savannah State, who went 0-28 this season.
- For this type of task - parsing text, building a relatively small tree, and playing with it - Python is the best. I love playing with data in the interpreter, coding very very high-level data structures in minutes, and trying things out as fast as I can type them.
[2]: The data analyzed here does not include tonight's North Carolina game, since I coded everything this afternoon. Tonight was the first time I was rooting for a sports team just to keep my blog consistent, but NC's defense was just too good for the Fightin' Illini.