In 1906, Francis Galton was visiting a livestock fair when he stumbled upon an interesting contest. Local villagers were asked to guess the weight of an ox, with the closest guess winning a prize. Of the over 800 guesses, nobody got the exact weight of 1,198 pounds. Afterward, Galton asked for the ballots, and upon compiling them, he found that the average guess was 1,197 pounds. To his surprise, the average guess was more accurate than any particular guess (Surowiecki, 2005).
