Back in the late 70s my uncle was at an auto show in Chicago at the McCormick place. There was a VW filled with beer cans of some particular brand. You could submit your name and your guess of the number of cans of beer and whomever was closest to the actual count won the beer (but not the car). My uncle won.
How did he guess so well? He was there very early on and he noticed a stack of cardboard trays stacked up in the corner of the venue. He counted the number of trays, multiplied by 24, and submitted that number. :-)
EDIT: I forgot to mention he was a functional alcoholic who drank beer constantly. It is appropriate he won it, but I'm not sure if was good for him.
back in the day at when I worked at a Seattle company there was a contest where a vase with an oblate spheroid shape was filled with M&Ms was left in the kitchen with some instructions for submitting guesses as to the total.
I created a 3D model of the vase in Blender, used some Python to get the interior area, and then found a figure for the average volume of M&Ms to get a count.
my guess was off by about half, but was very close to many of the other engineers' numbers, to the point where we asked them to recount. the recount revealed I was closest and it turns out they had used a method other than counting for the original number (they weighed them or something... it was way off).
How did he guess so well? He was there very early on and he noticed a stack of cardboard trays stacked up in the corner of the venue. He counted the number of trays, multiplied by 24, and submitted that number. :-)
EDIT: I forgot to mention he was a functional alcoholic who drank beer constantly. It is appropriate he won it, but I'm not sure if was good for him.