3 ms·
You have to be careful with this though. Benford's law only holds for certain types of data, such as growing populations. It has to do with the nature of the de
by astine 13y ago
You have to be careful with this though. Benford's law only holds for certain types of data, such as growing populations. It has to do with the nature of the decimal system.
- yen223 13y agoIt has more to do with the fact that a good chunk of natural phenomenon are distributed exponentially, not linearly. Benford's Law actually applies to other notational systems.
- Terr_ 13y agoTo be more specific, it has to do with the nature of any positional-notation system, whether it is decimal, octal, hex, or even binary.
- T-hawk 13y agoWow, thinking about Benford's Law in binary is really interesting, thanks for this comment. It's the most extreme expression of the concept. Every number in binary starts with 1. The only other possible leading digit would be a meaningless leading zero, so every number starts with 1. Benford's Law holds in the most extreme manner possible in binary notation, that numbers starting with 1 dominate the population over all others.