Metric Dimensions of March Madness Brackets

Abstract

Say you and some friends decide to make brackets for March Madness and are told how each of your brackets scored. The question we ask is: when can you determine how the actual tournament went given your scores? We determine the exact minimum number of brackets needed to do this for any March Madness-style tournament regardless of the scoring system used, and more generally we prove effective bounds for the problem for arbitrary single-elimination tournaments.