

Tonight, I'm going to write myself an Aston Martin - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-aston.html

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greendestiny
In sports photography you tend to take a burst of images. This means the ball
could be removed by copying from a previous frame and not leave a cloned
section.

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sosuke
via <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_the_ball_competition>

"the "correct answer" is the position of the ball as judged by a panel of
experts, rather than the position of the actual ball before it was removed,
this is because you cannot gamble on an event that as already happened"

which is the case in this particular competition, you are betting that you and
the judge with say the same spot as you guess on the image and not where the
actual ball was

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a-priori
So, the judges don't know where it was originally? They have to guess as well,
and that becomes the correct answer? That seems like a terrible way to judge
the competition.

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dkokelley
It's the same as the "guess how many jelly beans are in the jar" contests with
a baseball in the middle. Even if you mathematically figured out how many
should be in there, you'll still be wrong.

(I actually won a jar of skittles that wasn't loaded by mathematically
estimating the number of skittles. I wonder if this counts as a non-computer
system that I hacked for the YC funding application.)

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cdr
There were a lot of "guess the number of X in a jar" type contests when I was
in primary school. I think I won nearly every single one, because I was (one
of?) the the only one(s) estimating mathematically. It always seemed pretty
obvious to me.

Even with a baseball in the middle (assuming you know there's a baseball in
the middle), it's not impossible to estimate, and your guess is still going to
be better than someone who didn't try.

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dkokelley
That's the thing. You're not supposed to know if there's a baseball in there.

I guess going at it from a mathematical point of view (regardless of tricks)
will give you an advantage over a kid guessing something like "a million" or
almost any other random number.

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allenbrunson
this is an unhelpful title. i much prefer ones that let me know what the
article is about.

~~~
jkush
I thought it was rather good.

