The actual length of the skinny wire
around the trefoil knot is 566 feet and 1 inch.
The winning entry, by Craig Hutchings,
estimated the length to be 551 feet and 3 inches.
The runner up estimate is 600 feet,
an entry that was submitted by three different people.
How did
Craig do it?
Craig actually counted the number
of loops. He says that he allowed for some error in counting, but
he estimated the number of loops to be about 945. He also estimated
the length of each loop to be about 7 inches, and he multiplied 7 inches
x 945 to get 6,615 inches.
One other contestant told us he had a more creative approach. He looked at the sculpture and suddenly the number 76 came into his head. (When asked why 76, he said it was just an epiphany.) Then he multiplied by 2pi because he figured that 2pi "would have to be part of the solution somewhere." (Ah, all these years of high level education...) This resulted in 477 "and some change" which seemed like an OK number, but he decided to improve it by rounding up to the next power of 2, namely 512. (Why a power of 2? Well, engineers like powers of 2. And why round up instead of down? That's because there are so many more loops at the bottom of the sculpture.) Indeed.
Below is a histogram showing all the entries we received.