Internet comes together to guess total candies in a jar to help man win contest, secure paid day off

With Halloween right around the corner, corporate types have started to form games and company-sponsored Halloween events. The festive mood usually translates into contests, games and other things employees get to participate in. A Reddit user posted that their office is giving a paid day off to anyone who can most closely guess the number of candies in a jar that the office showed them. Reddit user u/Inside_Assumption_87 shared, "My corporate jobs attempt at Halloween festivities. job is offering a full-paid day off for anyone that can guess closest to the number of candies in the jar. I hate work as much as you, so help me out with a good guess."

Many users, in the spirit of the holiday and to help out a fellow Reddit user get a paid leave, started to wrack their brains to figure out the number. A user u/pke1029 was so thrilled by the problem that they created a computer simulation of the original poster's photo of the candy jar, arriving at number 113 for the number of candies that could be in the jar. The user's computer simulation got more than 68,700 upvotes, where everyone praised the user's dedication to the challenge.

Many users started to explain the math behind it to the original poster (OP), with user u/a_frayn commenting, "Bring a scale to the dollarama. Weigh the jar empty. Weigh jar with candy corn. Go to bulk barn. Weigh out ten candy corns. Full jar - empty jar = Total Candy (TC). 10CandyCorn / 10 = AverageCorn (AC). TC / AC = Guess" Another user u/mawkdugless explained, "If we're approximating, a piece of candy corn is about .5 x .5 x 1, so the volume would be ~.083in^3. A paper mate pen is ~6.1", so based off of the comparison, we can scale the jar size (I used Bluebeam since I have it up already) to arrive at the height of the jar at ~4.5" and usable height due to lid insert at ~3.5". Width is also ~3.5" as well. Since we know h and w, we can find volume at ~33.67395in^3. That gives us ~405 candy corns, but we'd need to account for space between the little delights, so I'd probably divide that by 1.5 ish, so if I had to guess, I'd say 270."

u/dustinlight suggested that OP should overage all the answers they got on the original thread. "FUN FACT OP: the statistically best way to guess IS to average the guesses from a large sample population. It turns out individuals are only okay at guessing but large groups are geniuses at it. If you take all the guesses from this thread, (getting rid of outliers like 420 & 69,) and average them together you will have a statistically very accurate number. Hope you win!"

Some users suggested that OP should stop wracking their brains and just steal the jar when no one is looking to find out how many candies are there. User u/0neLetter commented, "I mean is anyone looking right now? Just count them!!" User u/Square_Stranger2287 commented, "Find the place they bought it, find out how much it weighs at the store and how much a individual one weighs and it should give a good estimate of how many there are"

u/Sirliftalot35 commented, suggesting teaming up with everyone else, "It’s probably too late, but if you convinced everyone in the office to guess the same number, you’d all get a day off, right? Or would they try to split the day’s worth of hours among everyone who guessed the same number?"