I think the word “scone” should be a new mathematical term. “No, no, no, first you have to multiply these two functions before you can solve for scone.”
When I was a kid, I decided try to count as many grains of sand on the beach as I could. I got to about 83, before I saw an earwig and ran screaming in a random direction.
Earwigs, dude. They always fuck your shit up.
Well, whatever you’re counting there’s got to be some apparatus for doing the count. I have a bowl next to my front door that I put my change into. When there’s enough, I count it into rolls. If I multiply the number of rolls times the coins in each roll, I know the number of coins, even though I never counted higher than 50.
Brute force counting is the spirit of the OP, it seems. It’s how Chuck Norris would count how many necks he’s broke, which is near infinite.* Estimation and derivation is for pussies.
*do not attempt without a gingery beard and mullet!
Bottles of beer on the wall?
The guy putting them in boxes counted them.
There’s a variation on the OP’s question that I find interesting.
First, as the OP asks, what the largest “counted” thing? But then you have to ask how accurately is that thing counted?
Low numbers that are perfectly known are kind of boring. I’ve owned EXACTLY 6 vehicles in my life. The possible error here is pretty much zero but the number 6 isnt exactly mind boggling.
A burger chain may have served 100 billion burgers but I suspect that number isnt really known better than say one part in a few thousand give or take a factor of 10.
How about the number of gold bars stored in Fort Knox? Before the evil gubment cabal secretly sold them all off to the aliens that is. Pretty high number, actually counted (and probably recounted and recounted many times). Not an amazingly high number but I’d bet they knew pretty damn close to exactly how many bars there were in there at any give time.
Nuclear bombs. Or say the number of XYZ sized bolts in ABC number of nuclear weapons. They tend to keep track of that kinda shit pretty well.
Or how about rockets and satellites? Lots of parts there and its pretty rare for a part to be missing or an extra one just thrown in there somewhere (unlike my typical construction and repair jobs). Space Shuttle tiles. Lots of them and I’d bet not one rolled off the assembly line with a tile missing or an extra one glued on somewhere (before they started falling off that is).
Aircraft and fighter jets and the like. Boeing can probably tell you they have made exactly X number of Z type of aircraft and each one has Y number of rivets (or whatever thingy interests you) and that would be a large number and given the aviation industry (same goes for space stuff too) you can again be sure that there probably arent many missing or extra parts in there.
Just a thought.
We’ve discussed that figure before on the board, and it’s so ludicrously wrong that nobody was able to even figure out what miscalculation resulted in that number.
I think your question is worded wrong.
It sounds like what you’re looking for is, of all the classes of objects that have been counted, which class has the most objects that have been included in that count.
However, that’s not what it sounds like you’re looking for. The way your question is worded, a contender might be, for example, any one of the steps on a well used flight of stairs (for example, steps down to a subway station). Many slightly OCD people may count the steps so any one of them may be counted millions of times over the years. But I don’t think that’s what your’e looking for.
I think he’s a German spy.
You start counting with your pinkie? That’s sick. 
[quote=“Nava, post:28, topic:596786”]
You count “one” with your thumb? By the time I count with my thumb, I’m on “five”.
By the time all of my fingers and thumbs are used up, I’m up 1024. Throw in the toes and I can get to 1048576 ( if something doesn’t cramp up first ). 
[quote=“ruh-roh, post:52, topic:596786”]
Damn you have a lot of fingers. And toes. Where do you find shoes?
[quote=“ruh-roh, post:52, topic:596786”]
I can only get to 1048575 
need something to represent 0.
Or if you want to represent negative numbers, just use toe’s compliment.
If we’re including all of human history (both recorded and unrecorded) without the assistance of computers I would go with People or Food
When I was a kid, I decided to try to count how many licks it took to get to the center of a tootsie-roll pop.
Made it to a thousand before realizing my tongue was going numb.
The bit transactions in computers. Aren’t each one of them counted internally?
Here’s an answer that I haven’t seen suggested yet: Pachinko balls.
Background, for those who don’t know:
For extensive details, go Google it or find an entry on Wikipedia or some authoritative reference. I’m trying to be brief (really).
Pachinko machines were a fad in the USA during the mid 1970’s. They were imported from Japan as toys. In Japan they are and were used as a kind of gambling machine. We in the USA generally think of them as kind of like a vertical pinball machine; the Japanese tend to think of them as kind of like a surrogate slot machine. So you sit in front of this machine and, like pinball, you send a ball (maybe a quarter-inch diameter?) up and as gravity takes over it bounces around off pins and past distracting images and eventually it reaches the bottom and disappears. Unlike a modern pinball machine, there’s no way to ‘flip’ the ball back up amongst the pins. Then again, unlike a pinball machine you’re not limited to 3 balls. Like a slot machine, you can get lucky and get the machine to give you back some of your ‘investment’. This happens when your ball manages to fall into a special catcher amongst all the pins and other bouncy portions. Like a slot machine, there’s a fair amount of luck involved; like a pinball machine, there’s a decent amount of skill involved as well.
You can walk into a Pachinko Parlor with the Japanese version of a $10 bill and get, say, ten thousand pachinko balls. Then you sit on a stool in front of a machine and try to flip a ball into one of the many catchers. Naturally, some catchers have a better pay-off than others. You can take your un-flipped balls to another machine, stay at the same one and try to figure out just how hard to flip them to consistently hit the catchers, or turn them in to the ubiquitous parlor attendant.
By the time I was teaching over there, Japan had made it illegal to return cash for pachinko balls. That meant it wasn’t gambling. Instead, the pachinko parlor attendants let you redeem un-spent (or won) pachinko balls for Hello Kitty dolls, pens, cheap jewelry, expensive jewelry, clothing, accessories, watches, and electronic gadgets – the Japanese love their electronic gadgets – much like you’d redeem those little tickets that come out of the ski-ball machine at a carnival. Across the street and/or around the corner, two or three pawn shops will gladly pay you cash for your Hello Kitty dolls, pens, cheap jewelry, expensive jewelry, clothing, accessories, watches, and electronic gadgets. I suspect they then ‘sell’ the Hello Kitty dolls, pens, cheap jewelry, expensive jewelry, clothing, accessories, watches, and electronic gadgets back to the pachinko parlors.
But it’s not gambling. And because it’s not gambling there’s no organized crime involved. In fact, Japan has absolutely no gambling, prostitution, drugs, or organized crime at all.
But Pachinko is strongly regulated – you know, to make sure there’s no involvement by organized crime. And part of the regulation is a need for exact counts of the pachinko balls being redeemed so that there’s no chance for favoritism or influence (by those non-existent organized criminals) when it comes to exchanging, say, five million steel balls for a Pink Power Ranger action figure or pawning the doll across the street for the Japanese equivalent of five Hundred-Dollar bills. So part of the parlor attendant’s job is to pour a patron’s un-flipped (or won) pachinko balls into a huge heavy-duty funnel. To count pachinko balls, the funnel drops them onto a curved channel that runs past a little lever that turns a little numbered wheel that turns other numbered wheels (like an odometer) and each individual pachinko ball to be redeemed is counted, day in…day out…week in…month out….
Is that the kind of counting you’re talking about?
G!Well, sort of, but it sounds like they count one customer’s balls, then reset the counter to zero and count someone else’s. Eventually a ball will be returned, sold to another customer, and counted again when it’s turned in. Even if you added all the counts from one parlor, the result wouldn’t really mean anything because some of the balls have been counted multiple times.
I guess my question is what physical, distinct objects, for which there is an attempt made to perform an actual item-by-item count, has the count reached the highest number?
If the factory that makes pachinko balls counts them as they are made, that would be the kind of thing I’m looking for.