More counting

The counting fad continues, a fad last noticed at reference 1.

On this occasion, once again, the counting took the form of counting the people sitting in a segment of a tiered auditorium, the one, as it happens, illustrated left. Also, as it happens, with the lights down, so lighting conditions not great for counting. On the up side, people stayed in their seats and during the relevant period there was no coming and going, which would have made this sort of counting more or less impossible.

The segment was reasonably clearly marked out by rails and stairs, with only a modest amount of confusion being caused by one or two people being near the segment in question, but not in it.

Rather more confusion being caused by the untidy way in which people were sitting, far less tidy than the orderly and well-behaved children of 1961. Bearing in mind that Cuneo may have touched things up a bit.

Counting the people by sequential scan, in the way of counting the floors of Vauxhall Tower (see reference 2) seemed to be possible but unreliable. One had to concentrate to maintain both fixation on the right person and the count and even when one got to the end without accident, which was not very often, one was not very confident that one had the right answer.

What seemed to work better on this occasion was counting the number of people in each row enough times that the number in each row was more or less committed to memory and one could then work up the rows totting up the running total.

A further aid was breaking the count after the fourth row, where the running total was the easy to remember 30, then doing the easy sum of the next three rows, then adding in the small last row.

Evidence, of a sort, that breaking a problem down into chunks works better than going at it head-on.

PS: the answer, working up the rows, taking each row from left to right, turned out to be 6+7+8+9+11+12+11+6=70. The twelve caused some trouble, being mistaken for some time for an eleven.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/supplementary.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/shopping-lists.html.

Reference 3: http://www.rigb.org/. The exhortation which comes with the snap above being: 'discover who's who and what's happening in this beautiful iconic painting by Terence Cuneo, depicting Sir Lawrence Bragg presenting the 1961 Christmas lectures on electricity'.