Solving the classic Betting on the World Series problem using hill climbing

Solving the Classic Betting on the World Series Problem Using Hill Climbing

A simple example of hill climbing — and solving a problem that’s difficult to solve without optimization techniques

Betting on the World Series is an old, interesting, and challenging puzzle. It’s also a nice problem to demonstrate an optimization technique called hill climbing, which I’ll cover in this article.

Hill climbing is a well-established, and relatively straightforward optimization technique. There are many other examples online using it, but I thought this problem allowed for an interesting application of the technique and is worth looking at.

One place the puzzle can be seen in on a page hosted by was originally published in Towards Data Science on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.