Perhaps the most prevalent tournament format, however, is a bracket tournament—as in the famous NCAA basketball “March Madness,” among many others. The March Madness tournament progresses from the “Round of 64” and the “Round of 32” to the “Sweet 16,” “Elite Eight,” “Final Four,” and the finals. Each round divides the field in half: does that sound familiarly logarithmic? These tournaments are effectively Mergesort, beginning with unsorted pairs of teams and collating, collating, collating them.
