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

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.