Mathematically Clinching a Playoff Spot in the NHL and the Effect of Scoring Systems

A problem of intense interest to many sports fans as a season progresses is whether their favorite team has mathematically clinched a playoff spot; i.e., whether there is no possible scenario under which their team will not qualify. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining when a National Hockey League (NHL) team has clinched a playoff spot. The problem is known to be NP-Complete and current approaches are either heuristic, and therefore not always announced as early as possible, or are exact but do not scale up. In contrast, we present an approach based on constraint programming which is fast and exact.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: AI
• Authors: Tyrel Russell, Peter van Beek
• Keywords: AI 2008, Artificial Intelligence, National Hockey League, Playoff Spot, Team