Just answering so I don't miss the answer [LWN.net]

Just answering so I don't miss the answer

Posted May 10, 2011 21:25 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart by cmccabe
Parent article: Scale Fail (part 1)

It looks pretty random, but there are too few repeated consecutive digits: only three 77 and one 22. I give up, what is the pattern?

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Just answering so I don't miss the answer

Posted May 10, 2011 23:05 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

71 digits, which is prime so grouping them is unlikely to help.

If you consider just the first 4 digits (0,1,2,3), then even digits occur 10 times each, odd digits 5 time each. However this pattern does not continue (4 and 8 also occur 5 times, but are even).

The longest gap between repeats is 24 between 2 '8's.
'6' and '4' see gaps of 23.

'6' is the least frequent digit, 7 is the most frequent (3 times as frequent)

Taken as a decimal integer the factors less than 100 are
2,2,3,3,23,23

Yet the whole number is not a perfect square.

My conclusion is that this is probably the "least uninteresting number" - very interesting....