Trivia Question: Mu/Nu?
Last year I posted a couple of questions derived from our master database: What item are we selling that's the first alphabetically (answer here), and what item(s) are we selling last alphabetically (answers here).
I was poking at the database again, and – as I type this – we have 7,101 items in there . . . a nice round number. Which got me to thinking:
What item in our database is exactly "middle of the road"?
That is, which item is #3551 in our database (with 3,550 items above it; 3,550 below it)?
So, if the "alpha" trivia question was what's first, and the "omega" question is what's last, then this "mu/nu" question is what's in the middle.
Now, to explain some things about this challenge: This time, I'm looking at everything in our database. Each printing gets its own entry, so (for example) the 30 printings of Munchkin Deluxe take up 30 of those slots. Everything that's decades out of print is being counted. I'm also including items that were considered and canceled, or are in the works, which you have no way of knowing about fnord.
Why am I doing everything that's in our database? Well, figuring out the first and last item alphabetically that we were selling was trivial; I just needed to start with the master list of everything, see if we were still selling that item, and – if not – move further along the list until I got to something we actually had available. To find the item that is "middle of the pack" for everything we're selling, I'd need to create an absolute infallible master list of that . . . which seems like too much work for a silly little question. Unless I can figure out a clever way to determine it out in the future, at which point, I'll bring this question back.
Anyway, I'm curious about the "wisdom of the crowds," and how close you all can get to figuring out what item is "middle of the pack," alphabetically. There are lots of GURPS items; what does that do to the list? What about Zombie Dice? That'd nudge the middle up from the bottom of the alphabetical order, right?
Feel free to share your guess on the forums . . . along with your reasoning. I'm curious to hear what you all come up with.
The answer shall come – as most answers do – some time in the future!
-- Steven Marsh