A (moderately embarassing) update

After finishing this blog last night, we were excited to share it with other participants in the competition. We posted a link on the competition's discussion forum. Today, we got the following response:

...and that, my readers, is a giant glaring "OOPS" on our part. We spent a lot of time trying to predict the number of halos, when in fact, this data was given to us. On the one hand, it means our final "sketchy" attempt was actually legitimate. On the other hand... we spent *a lot* of time working on a non-existent problem. On the third hand (we've got four of them between the both of us)...we've got another "lesson learned" to add to our list from the last post:

Read and re-read the rules of a competition before diving into it.