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Pick a number, any number.
Posted By: Wes, on host 204.215.201.234
Date: Friday, June 22, 2001, at 23:41:39

I was looking through the past polls and found this one: http://www.rinkworks.com/poll/results.cgi?q=98 and it got me thinking about why that would happen, and I've come to some conclusions. I think I've come up with the thought process that a lot of people (well, me) go through when picking a number. It probably has something to do with wanting to pick a different number than most people would pick, or most people would expect you to pick. I think that it's something like this, for 1 through 10: "Okay, people are expecting me to pick the extremes, so I need to stay away from 1 and 10. I'll also need to stay away from 5, since people will expect me to pick the middle number too. I can't pick an even, since everyone will expect me to pick an even number. Okay, that leaves 3, 7, and 9. 9 is close to the extreme, so I don't want to pick that. I'll pick 7, since it's farther away from 10 than 3 is, but 3 would be my second choice."

So, given this information, I would think that the numbers from 1 to 10, listed by popularity would be something like 7, 3, 9, 8, 4, 2, 6, 5, 10, 1.

If there were a poll asking people to pick a number between one and one hundred, I'd be willing to bet a graph of it would appear low at both end and near the middle, and that there would be 'hills' around 25 and 75. I'm also willing to bet more people would chose odd numbers than even number. I'd even go farther than that and say that if you took the number of votes for prime numbers and divided it by total numbers of primes from 1 to 100, it would be more than the total votes for non-primes divided by the total number of non-primes from 1 to 100.

Wes

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