There are four heads on Mt. Rushmore. We can look at them and count them. One. Two. Three. Four.
My question is, what is the largest number of things that has been directly counted?
Two criteria:
They must be physical things. Not dollars in a ledger.
They must have been directly counted. Not estimated or calculated.
It doesn’t have to have been one person doing the counting. In fact, its okay if a machine did the counting. But you should be able to say “There are exactly X of Y. We know because we counted them one by one.”
I believe he is asking what has ALREADY been counted.
Interesting question. I’ll start it off with the number of uniformed soldiers in the world. If they are being paid, they are being accounted for and those numbers are available. That counted number must be in the millions.
Well, we tricked our drunken office clerk into counting all the cigerette butts in the 5gallon but container one time pretending we were betting on who could guess the closest to the number. But this was only several thousand so probably would not quailfy.
Many constants in physics are ginormous. Whether they have been counted “one by one” is a different story. They weren’t obtained that way, but in theory they could.
Even quantum stuff, given certain constraints–I think.
I think some of you are not understanding the question. It’s not about finding records of things and adding up all the numbers. It’s about actually COUNTING individual units, one by one, beginning with 1. 2. 3.
Inventory/sale/purchase counts for large businesses (say, Target or Wal-Mart) should easily pass billions of items, when you consider sales at stores and inventory at warehouses being consolidated into one final statement. They do actual counts of individual items in a number of ways - RFID tags, POS systems, hand counting, etc.
Loop structures in computer programs are, often, executed by counting one by one. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to count at several tens or even hundreds of millions of executions per secng, one by one, for hours, days, even months. I imagine people have done this with their machines already, either to test something or just for the achievement.
If we know that there are exactly 22 animal crackers in a box, and 144 boxes in a case, and 60 cases on a pallet, and 200 pallets in the warehouse, have we actually “counted” exactly 3,456,000 animal crackers?
Exactly. So they would not satisfy the conditions of the OP.
This question was inspired by a problem a friend of mine faces. She’s designing a board game with 50,000 pieces. (Yes, it’s kind of crazy. That’s part of the reason she’s doing it.)
Anyway, making sure she has exactly 50,000 pieces is a non-trivial exercise. She purchases the raw materials in bulk, but she can’t be certain that the bags from the factory contain exactly the right number. So at some point she’ll actually need to count them all to make sure they’re all there. And that got me wondering about other epic counting tasks.
In terms of Big Data science, I think bioinformatics is second only to high-energy physics in terms of raw data use. However, the data from a particle collider isn’t all about countable things. “Nucleotides sequenced” is definitely a countable quantity. With the latest equipment it’s pretty routine to read tens of billions of nucleotides. To address panache45’s objection, I would consider a single such data set to definitely meet the OP’s criteria. I would further WAG that sequencers might keep a total tally of sequenced nucleotides.
If you’d like to consider the total sum of counted, sequenced nucleotides:
The “next-gen” sequencer at my university can read a trillion nucleotides in a month of continuous use, and it’s booked pretty nearly round-the-clock. My WAG is that there are thousands of comparable sequencers around the world, and that technology is about ten years old. So just to count the raw data produced by next generation sequencing, I’d ballpark it in the 10 years * 10 months/year * 1000 sequencers * 1,000,000,000,000 reads/(sequencer*month) = 10^17 total sequenced nucleotides. Plus or minus an order of magnitude.
That’s spread around many thousands of individual projects, each with their own servers. There are some central databases (e.g. run by the NCBI) that try to collect all such data sets, and at the very least you could add up everything contained on such databases.
The set of things counted needs to be designated separately from the act of counting.
How many faces on Mt. Rushmore? Four. I can specify the set without making reference to the count.
How many people were counted in the Chinese census? 1,339,724,852. But in this case the set being counted is defined by the count. There certainly aren’t exactly that many people in China, because the census certainly missed a few.
How many pieces are in Brenda’s game? 50,000. That qualifies.
How many gene sequences have been sequenced? That doesn’t, because the counting process is what defines the set.
How many people are in China?
How many cells are in the human body?
How many automobiles are there on the Isle of Man?
What is the largest collection of physical objects that has been counted?