I didn't post these until now because 1) I am lazy :-), and 2) I didn't want anyone tampering with the system just to 'win' this thing (despite there being no prizes.)

As noted, the 100,000th node was posted on July 26, 2001 at 3:51p GMT

The guesses, sorted in guess order and GMT, are as follows: 

iptxs                  July 16, 10:15a
TStanley               July 18,  3:30p
CheeseLord             July 21,  1:59a
particle               July 21,  6:00p
ryddler                July 23,  9:00p
lemming                July 26, 11:43a
---100,000th NODE------July 26,  3:51p
ar0n                   July 26,  8:00p
ChemBoy                July 27,  5:36p
RhetTbull              July 27,  6:21p
grinder                July 28,  1:47p
John M. Dlugosz        July 28,  6:00p
Yer Mom                 Aug 14, 11:45a
carzyinsomniac          Aug 14,  8:00a

[download]
Lemming's guess is off the mark by 4hr 8mins, while ar0n's guess is off by 4hr 9min, a difference of one minute. So congrats to Lemming for 'winning' and ar0n for a very close second place.

Update - fixed a slight ordering problem, but doesn't affect results

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perlmonks Deadpool Results
by lemming (Priest) on Jul 26, 2001 at 23:35 UTC

    Being the genrous soul I am, I'll share my 'prize' with ar0n. ;)
    I'm surprised the method of figuring how many posts were done each month and extrapolating when antivroom was hit worked.

    Well, that and lack of competition

    Update:I don't recall which data points I hit, but I did take into account the fact that we are growing. Rather than do an indepth analysis, I fudged it. I think I just took off a few days.

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Re: Perlmonks Deadpool Results
by RhetTbull (Curate) on Jul 27, 2001 at 01:20 UTC
    I'm interested to know what methods lemming and ar0n (and the others who guessed) used to extrapolate the 100K date. Personally, I wrote a little script that retrieved every Nth node using XML::Parser::Lite and LWP::UserAgent from the Node query XML Generator

    for example: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=37150&nodes=$nodeid

    I grabbed the node ID and the time. I then converted the times into something I could easily manipulate mathematically and did a linear regression analysis. The real data is not actually a straight line of course since there is significant diurnal variation according to when people are awake, etc. There's also a weekly variation since weekend traffic drops off a bit. Although it didn't jump out at me, I'm sure there's also a bit of exponential growth to the curve since monastary traffic probably increses proportionally to the number of monks. I had hoped to make a model that accounted for these variations but ran out of time. At any rate, my linear regression came pretty close.

    Update: Fixed a spelling error

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