3 ms·

That's Benford's law, but I don't think it applies here. From Wikipedia: > Benford's Law tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple

• noduerme 3y ago
  it definitely shows up in 8-bit and 32-bit stuff though, doesn't it? There's just a lot less of those numbers where the leading digit (in decimal) is larger than 3 or so.
  • saghm 3y ago
    Assuming you aren't 0 padding, there are 111 unsigned 8-bit integers beginning with 1 (1, 10-19, and 100-199), 67 beginning with 2 (2, 20-29, and 200-255); all of the other digits appear 11 times (in single-digit form and as the leading digit in the tens place for their "decade") except 0, which appears first only in 0 itself. Unsigned 32-bit integers will have 1, 2, and 3 tied for first with 4 far back in fourth place and 5-9 in even the more distant penultimate position (with 0 still being last). If you're dealing with signed integers, you'll have an even more lopsided distribution in favor of 1 for both 8-bit and 32-bit numbers (assuming you don't count the negative sign). And of course, all of this is assuming base ten; you can make things even more uniform by using binary!
    • noduerme 3y ago
      well yeah, no one would want to argue that a leading '1' wasn't pretty predominant in unpadded binary ;) thank you for the good, concise, starter breakdown of why this is a feature of decimal math.