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Originally Posted by manasecret
Well done, Happydude.
I wonder how you guys calculated your guesses. I started by taking that top-down photo and counting the beans one at a time in Photoshop, marking each bean with a dot after I counted it. I counted 298.
That was the easy part. The hard part was trying to figure out how many layers of 298 there were.
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The problem with that is that the pile isn't the same height. The pile was the highest in the middle and kind of went sloping down the sides like a mountain. The way I did it was by using the can in the one picture. I measured the length of the can, and the height of the can where the highest jelly beans were. I then measured a real can, and I used the ratio to figure out the real height of where the jelly beans were. Then I measured the length of the bowl in the picture, and I had the height of the bowl in the picture, and my projected real height, so I was able to find the length. I then did the same thing for the width, but it took another picture to do that too. I then found the average volume of a jelly bean online. I calculated the volume of the bowl according to how much of it that the jelly beans occupied, based on what I saw..and then I took that over the avg volume of a jelly bean to find the amount. I got 726.8, but I lowered it to 715 because of the spaces inbetween the beans..but it wasn't as accurate as I hoped.
It kind of looks like Happydude just made a good guess, since his number is very simple. I mean, obviously Neo said that it is more common for people to underestimate the number, which happened, so Happydude probably guessed in the high 700s due to that. Then..he chose a fun number, 777. That's my assumption.