Nice. This reminds me of the German Tank problem in WWII, where the allies used samples of serial numbers from captured nazi tanks, to estimate their population

Nice. This reminds me of the German Tank problem in WWII, where the allies used samples of serial numbers from captured nazi tanks, to estimate their population. The tanks and their parts used sequential serial numbers. It could also be used to determine production rates too I guess. The idea pre-dates web APIs many decades :-) See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem