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]

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.