[racket] a small programming exercise

Stupid me, for I did already read about Benford's law.
Thanks. Jos 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: users-bounces at racket-lang.org 
> [mailto:users-bounces at racket-lang.org] On Behalf Of Chris Stephenson
> Sent: 15 October 2010 11:13
> To: users at 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
> cs at cs.bilgi.edu.tr
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