Quote Originally Posted by Pseudo_Nym View Post
If 30 players each post 200 words of roleplaying every day, how many months does it take for the length to equal War and Peace? Answer: 3.
According to the Interwebs, the English translation of War and Peace is around 560,000 words.

The number of players will be denoted by n, the round by t, and word count by w. The number of players is a function of t, and decreases by 2 every round. We start off with 30 players (n0), so players as a function of round is n(t)=30-2t. Trivially, the day when the game ends (aka, there are no players left) would be at most round 15.

Word count for a given day is 200 times the player count, or w(t)=200 n(t)=200 [30-2t]. The cumulative word count from round 0 to round T is simply the integral of w(t) evaluated from t=0 to t=T, or

Cumulative word count = -200 (T-30) T

We know that the maximum number of days possible is 15... so instead of doing a time consuming algebraic solve, lets just plug in T=15 to see the max word count we could reach and compare that to War and Peace's word count...

-200 (T-30) T
-200 (15-30) 15
45,000.

So, if the game were to go to its conclusion, we'd only write slightly more than 8% of Tolstoy's novel.