Quote:
Originally Posted by dingleberry
How would a computer program know what a guy is gonna get?
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Good question. It turns out that this is a case of a well-studied problem called the
knapsack problem.
The idea is this: Suppose a thief is rummaging through somebody's house. They have a knapsack to carry the items they steal. The knapsack has a fixed capacity, and each item that the thief could choose has a value and a weight. The goal is to determine which subset of items has the maximum value while still fitting in the knapsack. There are plenty of techniques which find this maximum value efficiently.
Well, if you replace 'weight' with cost, 'value' with points scored and capacity with $60,000, you have FanDuel. All you really need to start making teams with this idea is a database of non-injured players, their position and some definition of value, like points per game.
Of course, this still won't do as well as a good human player, because there's plenty of knowledge about individual team matchups and stuff. The next step would be to include this knowledge as additional variables in the setup of the problem. Hootie is on the right track by looking closely at what the best players do. If you find a way of turning that into a number, the computer can crunch it for you.
Doing a
Google search shows I'm not the first person to think of this, though there are only 2200 hits. One person
published a tool for making the picks which allows you to choose how you define value.