The total number of jelly beans was 712. David, who is married to Kait Reiley of the Kickstarter PopCycle campaign correctly guessed 712 and wins the book, Crowdsourcing (or possibly instead of that, another donation to the PopCycle campaign.) Someone else guessed 713 and they have declined their prize, so Kerry (after a coin flip since there were two guesses of 720) with a guess of 720 wins the book, Wisdom of the Crowds.

There were two unique guesses, one was a guess of 13,000 and the other was “average of all guesses plus 2.” The theory is that if you average all the guesses you get a really good guess, often better than any individual guess. There were 47 guesses including the 4 on Facebook. If you include all of them the average is 993.69. If you exclude the 13,000 which seemed like a rushed guess at the time as I was badgering friends to make guesses, the average is 726.89. This would be the 6th best guess after 712,713, 720, 720, 721.

The guesses ranged from 200 to 13,000 and the median guess was 646. Most of the guesses were low, but guesses like 4344 helped raise the average guess. Overall the members of the crowd did a great job guessing, since they hit the exact value and off by one. Thanks to everyone who made a guess and contributed to this experiment.