IgnitePortland: Asymptotically Approaching Zero Minutes

Some Math Fun¹ :

• Ignite 1: 250 tickets in 3 months. Assuming 90 days even, we have 10,368 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 2: 400 tickets in 2 days. 432 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 3: 450 tickets in 22 hours.  176 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 4: 550 tickets in 3.5 hours. 22.9 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 5: 560 tickets in 5.5 minutes. 0.59 seconds/ticket

Go on, graph it. It approximates an exponential curve. The equation

seconds = 86153 e^{(-2.2488(ignite))}

where “ignite” is the number of the event (i.e. IgnitePortland 6) and “seconds” is the number of seconds per ticket, the error value² is 0.9626.

What the hell does this mean? Well, assuming everything is the same next time, and things like server lag and response time don’t matter (which, they really, really do, unless Legion of Tech is using a serious cloud platform), it means that we can pretty closely estimate how long it’ll take to sell out Ignite Portland 6.

Go, on, it’s pretty funny. Plug it in. Put a 6 in there and see what you get. Naw, don’t. I’ll tell you. 0.12 seconds. Each ticket sells in a tenth of a second, meaning Ignite Portland 6 sells out of 560 tickets in 1.1 minute.

My prediction? It won’t happen. Legion of Tech just got hammered. They were shocked. I imagine that things will change for next time.

Still, it’s a pretty wild thought. Talk about popular! 1.1 minutes to sell out? I don’t think The Beatles ever did that!

1. With apologies to actual math lovers that I comically ignore assumptions and significant digits [↩]
2. As in “r squared,” yeah, I think it sucks as a metric too [↩]

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