GO. More Coin Fraud

In this segment, we give some explanation of how Benford’s Law actually arises in so many settings: why are so many kinds of data logarithmically distributed? And we give a surprising fact about runs of coin tosses, and a new puzzle. 

2 Comments »

  1. Mr H said,

    April 2, 2010 at 2:32 am

    When I was listening to this episode my instinct was to halve, halve and halve again giving values of $50, $25 and $12.50
    I set these values in an Excel sheet and found the difference to all the possible values.
    I did the same with the sevenths values in the given answer.
    If you then total the differences my values come out just over $10 better.
    Am I doing something wrong?
    I have placed the file at:
    http://www.singinghedgehog.co.uk/misc/mathfactorstorenumbers.xls
     
    Mr H

  2. Mr H said,

    April 12, 2010 at 5:50 pm

    . . . . but of course my original idea means that you cannot actual buy anything above $87.50 !!!!!
    Also, as Chaim pointed out in a email response to a different query, I have taken the absolute differences rather than the difference from the value one would have to pay.
     
    Other than that it seems okay ;-)

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