Stupid me, for I did already read about Benford's law. Thanks. Jos > -----Original Message----- > From: users-boun...@racket-lang.org > [mailto:users-boun...@racket-lang.org] On Behalf Of Chris Stephenson > Sent: 15 October 2010 11:13 > To: users@racket-lang.org > Subject: Re: [racket] a small programming exercise > > 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
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