A vote, of course. If the machine-counted results come out too close, then there is often a manual recount, or even two.
I’m pretty sure each form can have more than one person’s details on it, at least if it’s like any census form I’ve seen. They’re usually one per household. But yeah, that’s got to be at least 300-400 million or so individual forms, even so.
Large factories must meet this requirement. Model Ts out of the River Rouge factory, for instance, must be high on the list. They were accurately counted out of one factory.
Or smaller things like maybe iPhones out of a single factory or something.
Good estimate- “The census found a total of 401,517,330 family households in Mainland China.”
Here in New Zealand there’s a dwelling form and forms for each individual as well. Not sure what system China uses.
It’s a pretty small country where a census is counted one by one, otherwise it will take too long. One person would have to start counting from one, and anyone else in the process would have to wait until that first person is done before they’d know what number to start with. Instead each person involved will start counting from one, and then subtotals will be added.
While this doesn’t answer the question posed by the OP, the above being the premise for his question is flawed, in the sense that his friend’s counting of the 50,000 pieces will not even meet the criteria he has laid out for this thread.
She also does not need to have an exact count of the 50,000 pieces, one by one. She could easily estimate and make sure that she has some margin of error with overage. That’s what most game company’s do with pieces. That’s why there are always extra pieces.
I think sports offer a good example. For instance, they knew that the 200,000th game in Major League Baseball history was played in September 2011. Of course, it took 135 years and many, many people to count 200,000 games, but at some point they were counted one by one, so that some guy could later calculate that 162 games x 30 teams = 4230 games if every team played every game in a given season, and then add it all up.
Of course, per the OP, a baseball game is not a physical thing. But the same exercise can be done with regards to the number of human beings having played in a MLB game. Or the number of tickets sold.
Enormous numbers of cells are routinely counted by machine. It really is a “one-by-one” counting, as they go by a detector.
There are beta radiation gages that count beta particles constantly, around the clock, for years, at the rate of around half a million per second. I figure that is counting about a hundred trillion physical objects.
I really don’t understand why some people can’t comprehend what the OP is asking for. It was obvious to some of us from the beginning.
Did you count how many people it was obvious to?
It’s an art game project where the precise number of pieces is significant. So yes, she will be making sure there are exactly 50,000 of them.
Yes, and it’s not a very large number.
Bottles of beer on the wall.
So she cannot have less than 50,000. What harm is caused by having 50,002?
My interpretation of the OP is something that is countable and measurable by a third party. You can’t accurately count how big the population of a country is because it changes every hour, and you can’t say for certain whether a computer has measured exactly the number of photons that have passed through the eye of a needle.
My guess is stars (over a fixed luminosity); it take eons for the number to change and you can check the count every night.
It’s a concept piece. It’s important that there be exactly 50,000 pieces. She’s also hand-painting them.
Oh ok. I thought it was a production model. One of a kind is a different story.
Because it is the SDMB. A large (but uncountable) percentage of posters consider it their job to prove the OP wrong or imprecise. If he had asked how many heads were on Mount Rushmore, there would have been a lively discussion about if this includes maintenance workers and any birds/insects that happen to be standing on it at the time.
How about dollar bills? A particular production run of Dollar Bills is a closed set, individually counted and serialized. The Treasury prints, what, a few billion of the things every year?
It’s not a complete count as presumably they are still adding to it, but how about astronomers counting stars? The USNO-B1.0 Catalogcontains over a billion stars (1,042,618,261 according to wikipedia). These are all unique physical, fixed and referenced one at a time.