News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
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.
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.