@traders Forks is currently winning, but you can change that! There is ~M1.8k to be won if you get spoons' numbers above 7 trillion.
https://manifold.markets/100Anonymous/should-dna-replication-forks-argini-NRsE6Izp9l Promoting this poll again to incentivise more votes.

Should DNA replication forks, arginine forks, or fruit fly spoons be counted?

In relation to my forks versus spoons market here: https://manifold.markets/100Anonymous/are-there-more-forks-than-spoons-in#r8t9u86p3jj Note that I will only count your vote if you don't have a financial stake in the market or if you provide VERY good reasoning.

Created a tag to conveniently group this market genre together

The estimate for the number of chess forks is ridiculously low. A fork occurs when two pieces are attacked at the same time y a single piece. This occurs something on the order of once per midgame position. The current estimate is probably an order of magnitude off from the number of games.

@notreally please read the conversation which has confirmed that only actual played games containing forks are counted. Note that forks aren't as common as you think; many people, even amateurs, know about forks and try to avoid them.

@100Anonymous 1) A fork is any time one piece can capture two pieces. There does not have to be a tactical advantage granted. In a midgame position, this is, on average, true of at least one piece regardless of the level of play. Pawns count.

2) more than a trillion games of chess have been played in total. Each contains many forks.

@notreally I didn't consider that folks don't always have to be tactical. I'll look at this again.

@100Anonymous I am assuming that at least three such forks would be there in a chess game.
Around one trillion chess games as per earlier discussion. So the new count for forks is roughly 3 trillion.

I would also point out the fishing lure known as a “spoon” in addition to the safety lever on many grenades being called the “spoon.”

@NicpSUCg I'll check the numbers for these soon when I have time.

@NicpSUCg A typical lure costs roughly $3–10
Lure Market is several billion. I am pretty sure fishers would have accumulated this over 10-15 years, so I am estimating around 10 billion spoons.
https://www.marketgrowthreports.com/market-reports/fishing-lures-market-107604
Get used up, so I'll take the yearly count. Around 100 million.
Forks are still winning by a large margin.

Military Hand Grenade Market Research Report 2034

The military hand grenade market was valued at $3.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.1 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 5.4%.

Claim: most constellations are very subjective, and must have meaning assigned by humans. However, stars have an inherent propensity to form spoons. As a result, most planets, inhabited or not, have 1-3 dippers

@HastingsGreer well, are these actually called spoons? because I wouldn't call all constellations that look like a spoon just 'spoon'

@100Anonymous I Figured, but one has to try a cheeky argument sometimes if it can swing an 80 20 meme market.

https://manifold.markets/100Anonymous/should-dna-replication-forks-argini-NRsE6Izp9l
Poll on arginine forks, fruit fly spoons, and DNA replication forks is live now! Vote if you have not invested in the market or have good reasoning.

@100Anonymous note that I will allow each option if they get more than 10 eligible votes

Any ruling on sporks?

@NicpSUCg "Anything called a fork or spoon counts, but things similar to forks or spoons but not called as such do not." Sporks do not count.

@100Anonymous ah but spork is a portmanteau of both words “spoon” and “fork,” so arguably, it is actually called both, not neither.

@NicpSUCg either way, it doesn't really matter, as even if they were counted for both spoons and forks, it would still cancel out. Fine, I will count them, but they are not really that helpful to either spoons or forks, and there's only a couple billion of them in the world.

I'm happy to see this series of markets has returned! To try to keep spoons in the game, I suggest the Spoon of drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), a protein-coding gene that is officially called "spoon."

>Identification of Spoon as a suppressor of SCA8 associated neurodegeneration provides us a hint about its role in neuronal development and maintenance. However, a detailed molecular characterization of spoon has not yet been reported. Here, we describe spatial expression pattern of Spoon during Drosophila development

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28722203/

There are few estimates of the number of fruit flies, but a conservative lower bound is in the trillions (10e12). Fruit flies are on average made up of around 10e7 cells, and a conservative estimate for gene expression gives 10e3 proteins per cell, or 10e22 in total. Even if each instance of the gene is a spoon, not each protein, this is still trillions of spoons.

@spiderduckpig There are also DNA replication forks, and arginine forks, which I'm surprised noone has mentioned.

Assuming there are over 10e5 prokaryotic cells per eukaroytic cells, we can estimate about 10e30 DNA replication forks, given 2 per the 10e30 prokaryotic cells. Arginine forks seem a bit less convincing to be forks, since they are more like events than physical things, but there are 10e35 if they count, given 10e5 ribosomes per 10e30 cells.

@spiderduckpig interesting. I agreed with @Bandors earlier that microscopic things shouldn't count, but this is a very interesting case. I'll hold a poll.

If we count rivers, there's almost certainly hundreds of millions of forks into streams. There's also hundreds of millions of pitchforks. I think that at some point forks must outweigh spoons.

@sadeshmukh And one guy mentioned code forks below, which may be even more numerous as they do have a distinct non-infinite number but it can be *almost* abstractly high.

Can I get a ruling on:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-forks-would-a-single-Db0Obh4USBCWj_mzgujhyA

@MattCWilson They do count, but note that they are only 10^9, and we have forks that I've got to the 10^11 already, so yeah, they count, but they are mostly irrelevant.

@MattCWilson ok, looking at the conversation further, yes, so these folks are created, but again I will only count the ones which were recorded. Closer said that one trillion forks were stored, but I would likely reduce that number since many of them get deleted as part of cache so 10^11 forks, which doubles the number of forks present. Team Spoons, come on! We need a comeback.
P.S. I just want to encourage more arguments from both sides.

@100Anonymous by my math. The number of forks and table bases is closer to 10 to the 13th.

@HastingsGreer it's late at night for me, but I'll do research tomorrow. I'll see how many table bases I can see.

@100Anonymous thanks for the reply. Please note that the link is asking about a single CPU, so you would wanna multiply by some approximating factor to get the right order of magnitude. Feels like it could easily get into the ^15-18 range.

@MattCWilson I know, but I am looking at actually stored forks in the computer because these fork operations run and then end. I only made an exception for specifically chess forks because they make sense to call forks when they actually occur in the sense that it is recorded in someone's mind.

@HastingsGreer well, I checked. Wikipedia says that there's 4 x 10^14 table bases.
Since table bases involve the best possible play, I would assume that there'd be around 1% (as is seen in Grandmasters' games) forks. That would tell that it is 4 into 10 to the 12 forks. It is already 3 trillion right now, so the total count of forks has increased to 7 trillion. Come on, spoons, do something!