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A comment on Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Unobserved Variables. Parent comment

Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by klodolph on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:17AM (#13283059)
A Galton box generates a binomial distribution.

Most probability distributions are designed to model some kind of process. The time between clicks of a geiger counter is exponential, the number of clicks in a second is poisson. The amount of time your geiger counter lasts before it breaks and you have to buy a new one is weibull. That's the whole reason why we invented probability distributions in the first place: to model processes.

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Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by dekhn on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:16PM (#13286013)
The Galton box generates a binomial distribution which when taken to the limit of n->infinity, produces a normal distribution.
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Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by klodolph on Friday January 06, 2017 @12:15AM (#13334142)
This is incorrect, you need to take a limit as n->infinity while dividing by a factor of √n, otherwise the limit does not exist. But Galton boxes in practice are not very large, so they aren't very good approximations of normal distributions.
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