Re: [libreoffice-users] Benford's Law

On 2013-07-15 09:01, Toki Kantoor wrote:
> On 07/13/2013 11:01 PM, Brian Barker wrote:
>
> > Unless I misunderstand,the formula =10^RAND() should create random variates in the range (1,10) 
> > following the law.
> 10^RAND generates a set of random numbers that does _not_ adhere to
> Benford's Law.  I need a random number generator whose output does
> adhere to Benford's Law.
>
> jonathon
Hi
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
Therefore, this is the distribution expected if the mantissae 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significand> of the /logarithms/ of the 
numbers (but not the numbers themselves) are uniformly and randomly 
distributed 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_%28continuous%29>.

In a logarithm the part after the decimal point is the mantissa. Convert 
a logarithm to decimal by number=10^(logarithm).
For numbers between 1 and 10 logarithm will be between 0 and 1. 
Therefore 10^(rand()) should produce numbers randomly between 1 and 10 
conforming with Benford's law.

=10^RAND() is the same as 10^(rand())

Steve



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