Well, I promised in October that I would do an age distribution of the winners so here it is:
To refresh your memory, the age distribution of participants is here where we see that participants' age spike at 18 and drop off after. Do not take the percentage of winners in the 70-100 age range seriously. There are very few particpants in that range (less than 10 per age group) and finishing or not finishing skews the percentage significantly. So if there is only one 88-year-old participating not finishing (0%) and only one 96-year-old participating but winning (100%)--this does not mean that all 88-year-olds will lose and all 96-year-olds will win. The sample size is just too small to tell accurately.
Looking at the rest of the age range, there is a slight trend that you will have increased chances of getting to 50k the older you are. However, I'm not sure how significant that really is. As usual, the disclaimers apply about people lying about their age on their profiles, etc. The figures for total participants and winners were taken today and probably does not include winners who handwrote their entire manuscript (yikes!) and are currently being verified. (Total participating: 59705; total winners: 9765; percentage of total with unreported ages: 36.5%; percentage of winners with unreported ages: 22.8%)
