I have no clue what this is about. I bid 37.
Revealing the bids so far pretty much ruins this little experiment.
What do you mean? They are already visible in the thread for anyone who clicks the spoilers. As per the OP, participants in the auction are supposed to bid before reading any of the spoilers.
They don’t have to read the spoilers if you unspoil all the answers, do they?
My bid is 3
But… my post was also spoilered. I’m still not seeing the problem. OK, my post makes it slightly easier for those who want to cheat, but it was pretty easy anyway. Also, it doesn’t really matter if one or two people cheat - as long as most don’t, we’ll still have something interesting.
Six. I look forward to not getting my Bahamian island.
$1,000,000
This is a good, interesting idea but I think to really give it a try we’d need to have an independent disinterested party hold on to the bids. The honor system will only take you so far in a contest like this.
I think also it would be a good idea to try to nail down a set number of participants and ask them to commit to it before we start. Hopefully it’s be a whole lot of people.
When I first saw it, your post was not spoilered. If that was a glitch on my end, I apologize.
Ah, I see - I guess it was a glitch. I checked (both before and after posting) and it was spoilered for me! No worries, thanks for clearing that up.
The disinterested party would be nice but it ain’t happening here. The stakes are so low that it minimizes the risk of cheating but someone at some point will inadvertently read most of the thread before answering, which does ruin it a bit.
I don’t think setting the number of participants makes any sense. That puts an upper limit on the number anyone should guess, since the winning will have to be less than the number of participants. I like that part of the game is guessing how many people will participate as well as how they will distribute their guesses.
I’m guessing if you ran enough of these contests, the answers would likely be somewhat predictable based solely on the number of people who participate.
00043
No particular reason.
But with everyone posting their bids in this thread there is no mystery about exactly how many people are participating.
And people cheat in games with nothing on the line all the time. It wouldn’t be the worst sin in the world if someone read the spoilered bids before they posted their own bid. No biggie in the greater scheme of things.
But due to the dynamics of this “experiment” it’s pretty much ruined if people peek ahead of time.
You don’t know how many people will post after you, so the later you bid the more information you have. If we were doing this as a party game, everyone would write their bids down on a slip of paper and turn them in simultaneously. Everyone would have the same amount of information going in.
Oh shit. I think I just spaced that completely. Thanks.
I still think everyone should privately submit their bid to a disinterested party. That way nothing is known about the number of participants and who bid what and when the bid it. Which I think would effectively work the same as simultaneous submissions–
Summary
Twenty-seven cents.
Summary
I don’t think that’s a fraction. It’s twenty-seven whole cents.
– I see that I used a different spoiler technique than everybody else. Hope it’s working.
That’s a fine algorithm you’ve got there. It’s probably close to optimal.
As to number of bidders it’s going to be close to but less than the number of posts. I’ll be post #38 unless somebody sneaks in while I’m ruminating.
I bid disguise 17 more disguise.
Funny you should have applied my algorithm, the result does not surprise me. A bit disappointed I am, though, I’m out. So are you 
Now that is funny. No cheating on my part either.
Though when I bid I did recognize that that was an “attractive” number to certain kinds of discerning minds. And as such poor tactics. Akin to picking 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in a lottery.