3 ms·
It's not a perfect fit, but it's unsettling to me how close the leading PIN digit graph corresponds to Benford's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27
by gpcz 14y ago
It's not a perfect fit, but it's unsettling to me how close the leading PIN digit graph corresponds to Benford's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law ). You would think intentional human randomness would not fit this distribution.
- alexmchale 14y agoThe naming of Benford's Law has long bothered me. It feels to me like it should be Benford's Observation. Awesome catch, though! I love it.
- T-hawk 14y agoThe humans aren't being random. They're using numbers from sources in real life. A large fraction of the data points are years from the twentieth century as 19xx and a smaller fraction as 200x. MMDD or DDMM format dates also follow the Law in tending to lead with digits 0-3. Or consider the 2580 case or other patterns on the keypad, where the leading digit will skew towards the beginning of the digit-alphabet. So Benford's Law will apply even on a data set that has no numerical meaning in itself, transitively from the real sources of the numbers.