As it turns out EVH did in fact triumph over Jimi and while my wife may be thrilled I am just amazed......The finals are Jimmy Page versus EVH but I have a pretty good idea how that vote will go given todays ballots.
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Picking 32 or 64 items and having them face off in a single elimination tournament is a popular way to generate interest in whatever the items are or in the entity hosting the tournament. So there are lots of them and they have no meaning beyond what promoters and participants give them.
In that spirit there was once a bracket that pitted local breweries against each other. As a consumer of local beers various breweries were telling me about the contest and asking for my support. In the second round a brewery I very much like was pitted against one I loathed. The voting rules were lax - you could vote often but votes from the same IP address had to be about an hour apart. My brewery was losing so I wrote something that would submit a vote every hour. It worked but someone else was doing the same thing so my brewery was not winning. I enlisted the help of a couple of friends. One friend, who had similar opinions on the breweries decided to leverage the technologies he knew best and the end result was a series of bots hosted in the Amazon Cloud that generated about 100 votes per hour and could scale to produce more if needed. Our brewery won by about 30,000 to 10,000 which I attribute to my friend being a better technologist than whoever was supporting the losing brewery. We continued to support our brewery until it won the bracket, although we scaled the bots back so the results were closer. What was interesting was that the 40K total votes in one round were greater than the sum of all of the other votes.
So I tend not to invest anything based upon the results of online brackets and my understanding of the relative merits of Jimmy Page and EVH will remain unchanged.
Here endeth the Veer
P.S. - Since then I have moved and the loathed brewery is one of two breweries within walking distance. They are not the best beer in town but my opinion has softened and they do have an oatmeal stout and a Belgian Tripel that I will draw me in when they are on tap.
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