Study Finds Best Mario Kart 8 Setup From All 703,560 Possible Combos

Sick of blue shells? Want to stick it to a tie-wearing ape in a go-kart race? Parisian economist Antoine Mayerowski has done the math to find the best possible combination of karts, wheels, and gliders from all 700,000+ possible combinations offered up in Mario Kart 8: Peach with the Teddy Buggy, roller tires, and cloud glider.

Mayerowski's remarkable study comes down to a creative application of the methods of economist Vilfredo Pareto. Given Vilfredo died in 1923, he probably didn't have Mario Kart in mind as a testbed for his theories, but it works.

This article won't wade too deep into the 19th century Italian economic weeds, but Pareto was an expert in the mathematics of trade-offs. He addressed situations with multiple elements interacting with one another, where a benefit to one element comes with a drawback to another. He found ways to optimize those situations, delivering sufficient benefit to every member of a system that any change would cause a drawback, making the system worse. That kind of optimized system is "Pareto-efficient."