THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

Well, it's happened. I'm surrounded by chocolate.

It's happened because my manager won the 'How many Eggs in the Jar' competition and got rewarded with all 76 of them. That is a lot of chocolate eggs for one person.

What was interesting was how he did it. I studied the jar and thought about counting a cross-section then multiplying by the length - that ought to work in theory. I plumped for 95. He simply added up everyone else's guesses and worked out an average.

It's a simple statistical version of the Wisdom of Crowds - something I don't know much about. I think the idea is that a large group of people will normalise themselves around the most probable statistical average. In other words, between all of us, we were able to calculate the most likely number of eggs in the jar, by collectively finding the peak of the bell curve. Fascinating isn't it?

And it turned out to be pretty much bang on. The average was 76.6.

Anyway, he's giving away eggs to anyone who's coming over. I'm feeling a bit queasy because I can't help imagining that they're actual eggs - and eating loads of those would be awful.