On 15/10/10 11:33, Jos Koot wrote: > When taking a long list of pseudo random positive integers most of which are > far greater than the base, I expect about the same frequency for each first > digit from 1 to base-1. This seems to hold if the base is a power of 10, but > for other bases, e.g. base 24, I get rather unexpected results. See program > below. Someone has an idea how this can happen?
That is exactly the effect that Shriram was looking for. Think about the decimal numbers in the range 1-200. How many start with 1?- More than half. The range 1-1000 is an exception. But natural distributions are not uniform over a fixed range. They are bell curves of one sort or another. If you have a natural random distribution there will always be a skew toward the smaller digits. It is quantified as Benford's law. -- Chris Stephenson c...@cs.bilgi.edu.tr _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
