And the winner is ....

[jwgh]

mmcirvin, who guessed 5,271,009. The actual mean of all the guesses was approximately 168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,350,168,355,203.093093. There were 33 guesses. Matt, if you email me your mailing address, I'll mail you my five dollars.

If we had been using the median, the correct answer would have been 44, and the winner would have been either katrinkles or plant_geek, both of whom guessed 44.

Nobody guessed a negative number. Also, nobody guessed a transcendental number (like pi or e or 1.01001000100001...). Two people expressed their entries as fractions (thirty-three and one third and seven and a half); these were also the only entries written out. Four people picked decimals (7.5, 7.6, 50.1, and 83.76). With those exceptions, everyone else picked a positive integer.

The smallest guess was 0, while the largest was 5,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555,555. (I almost disqualified that latter guess, as it came close to violating my request regarding not submitting entries that make me do complicated calculations, but dividing it by 33 wasn't that bad. If I had disqualified it then annarama would have won with her guess of 1999.)

The most common number picked was 7, which was picked by three people. The closest non-identical guesses were 7.5 and 7.6.

The smallest ten entries were in the range 0-16; the next ten were in the range 27-72; the next ten were 73-1508; and the top three were 1999, 5271009, and the big honkin' list of fives.

entry #	number
1	thirty-three and one third
2	42
3	44
4	seven and a half
5	16
6	8
7	101
8	10
9	36
10	7.6
11	27
12	0
13	7
14	500
15	7
16	7
17	50.1
18	986
19	1,999
20	73
21	84
22	37
23	5,271,009
24	54
25	1508
26	83.76
27	44
28	353
29	5.5556E+99
30	72
31	643
32	483
33	8

Discuss! Or not.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hooray!

I made my guess using no particular reasoning; it was a literary reference.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...it did occur to me after the fact that if somebody made an outrageously enormous entry like 10^100, mine just might be the largest of the not-outrageously-enormous entries, and therefore win. And that was exactly what happened.

[jwgh]

There were a number of entries which, when they appeared, made me think, wow, that's ridiculously large ... but then later entries appeared which made it clear that those entries actually had a shot at winning.

Hmm, maybe that's an interesting figure: which entries were larger than all the entries before them? Looking over my table I guess it's entries 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 18, 19, 23, and 29. There's a lot of prime numbers there.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Also you two need to stop having the same icon.

[jwgh]

Would you be happier if I had snow on my head?

[jwgh]

Some comments about strategy, with the benefit of hindsight:

This being the Internet, and my friends being who they are, it was probably somewhat likely that at least one person would guess an absurdly large number, just for the hell of it. If that happened then you would ideally pick a large, but less absurdly large, number, since that would put you closer to the average than if you just picked a random smallish number. The big problems with this strategy are: (1) the terms 'absurdly large', 'less absurdly large', and 'smallish' mean different things to different people; and (2) if everyone thinks this way then you'll end up with a bunch of picks in the 'less absurdly large' range, whatever that is, and your advantage will be neutralized. Nonetheless, I think at least a couple of people used this reasoning (including possibly the person who picked the biggest number, since it wasn't the largest possible number; someone could have picked a bunch of nines, or used scientific notation).

I had wondered in advance if anyone would reveal their guess in the comments (which I didn't forbid), and if it would be in their advantage to do so. I think theoretically it might be advantageous to do so if nobody else has already revealed their guess; if someone else has then it's generally a bad idea, because then new contestants can pick the average of the already-revealed scores. Anyway, nobody did reveal their guesses.

One strategy a couple of people used was trash-talking, which I thoroughly approve of.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It crossed my mind to be a smartass and actually enter one of the largest finite numbers I could think of, but those tend to be in the forbidden category of "requiring looking stuff up or complex calculations", as they are not feasibly expressible in any standard numerical notation.

My favorite huge numbers are the ones in the busy-beaver sequence, which is defined as the number of program steps taken by the longest-running Turing machine of N states that eventually halts; the sequence eventually increases more rapidly than any Turing-computable sequence of finite numbers, because if it didn't, you could use it to solve Turing's halting problem, which leads to a contradiction.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

I was, of course, the yobbo who guessed all those 5's. The way I chose the number I picked was that I filled the comment field with 5's. I was betting on someone else filling the field with 9's, and I lost.

I should break this up into sentences; it's just that

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I'm just a little miffed that, thanks to you for guessing it, jwgh for posting as much, and the fact that I don't have that many prolific posters on my friends list, conspire to produce a margin-breaking post which will endure on my friends list for days and days, a phenomenon I detest more than bad ham, but less than bad cheese.

Re: I should break this up into sentences; it's just that

[jwgh]

Hmmm. I tried to do something about this (by putting '<span></span>' after each comma) but it doesn't seem to have worked. Do you know of something else that might do the trick?

It's because of problems like this that I switched to the 'Generator' friends view scheme.

Re: I should break this up into sentences; it's just that

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Heh, don't sweat it. I use Opera on Win2K and XP, and Opera's just far enough from common compliance that I'm used to the occasional visual discomfort. Thanks for trying, though! Most people don't.

I think I might've just reduced the font size or tried "small." And I'll look at the Generator view.

Re: I should break this up into sentences; it's just that

[jwgh]

Oh, that's a good idea. It is done.

Re: I should break this up into sentences; it's just that

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I've switched to Generator, which is a pleasant view, and your small tag fits the number nicely in my margins despite a toolbar on the right side of my screen. I'm not sure which of the two things did the most to fix it, but I thank you for both.

There's always

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

the soft hyphen: ­

Of course, in mathematical contexts, that can introduce confusion about whether you might mean subtraction, but it would be pretty silly to interpret a hyphenated number as a subtraction problem in the context of talking about Really Big Numbers, especially when there's a comma before the hyphen.

168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­350,­168,­355,­203.093093.

Hmmmm. In preview, my hyphenated number got split with WBR elements into segments too short for the hyphens ever to be used. I wonder if that will also happen in posting the comment.

Yep.

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

But this seems to show that WBR is sufficient to create breaks in Mozilla even though it's a MS proprietary element:

AAAAAARGH! Except that LJ actually strips them out when I explicitly enter them, and then doesn't automatically insert any of its own! I couldn't even enter them with the "Don't auto-format" box checked.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I've fooled around with the soft hyphen. Results are mixed.

[jwgh]

... it also occurred to me that someone could have gotten cute and submitted something like 'the average of all of the other entries', or 'one less than the largest other entry'. I'm not sure what I would have done with these; probably disqualified them, since all it would take would be two 'the average of all the other entries' entries and I would have had to crack out the algebra to figure out what the entries actually were. (And of course in some circumstances those sorts of entries would actually not have defined values, especially if a lot of people got cute like that.)

[jwgh]

My other question is, if I held the same contest again today with the same group of people, would they pick the same numbers or would they change their strategy? However, I don't care enough about this to put up another five dollars, so this will have to remain one of history's great question marks.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I think Matt should hold this contest, seeing as how he now has an extra five bucks.

[witsarah.livejournal.com]

I support that. Since neither of us won, we can now team up...and fight crime!

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

If I were re-doing this contest, I would restrict it to positive integers, and I would change the victory criterion to be similar to The Price Is Right's: whoever comes closest to the average without going over. That would eliminate me guessing all those 5's, which I'm now vaguely ashamed of.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

I always pick 7.

I like 7.

7 is pretty.

[jwgh]

Good old 7! Nothing beats that.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked there was only one 42.

I submitted a non-integer (50.1), for the same reason I always bid odd amounts on eBay: I don't like ties.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

In that case, if I can't enter a 7, I will be sure to enter 50.1 just to be a jerk.

[annarama.livejournal.com]

damn!!! i could have won!! oh well.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

You seem to have made some mistake in your calculations, because you have erroneously announced somebody other than me as the winner.

[witsarah.livejournal.com]

AND me. What's up with that? Clearly I won, as asserted in advance.

[katrinkles.livejournal.com]

although most of this math stuff is way over my head (such as "median" and "mean" for example) i think it's pretty funny that jenna and i randomly chose the same number. what's up with that?

[jwgh]

Yeah, it was also kind of crazy that the three people who picked 7 were all almost in a group.

Mean is the kind of average people usually mean when they use the word 'average': you add up all the numbers, then divide by the number of numbers.

Median is a little more simple-minded: you list all the numbers in order from lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. (If there's an even number of numbers, so there isn't a single number in the middle, then you take the average of the two numbers in the middle.)

[katrinkles.livejournal.com]

ah, right.

[plant-geek.livejournal.com]

what is up with that is that we are soulmates :)