Imagine there is a box with apples in it, but you do not know how many apples are in the box.

Let’s say you ask 10 people to count the number of apples in the box. Before the 10 people respond, the only number you can use to represent the number of the apples in the box is a number with maximum uncertainty (it could be as small as 0 and as large as, say, 1 million). Let’s say that when the 10 people respond to your question, they respond with the count of the number of apples as 90, 120, 96, 20, 99, 102, 112, 68, 90, and 109. This set of numbers together now represents your uncertainty about the number of apples.

The picture below is one way to represent that uncertainty (Signaloid’s processor has an efficient way to represent this so that it can do calculations such as additions, multiplications, and so on, with it):