# Overrandomized: Approximations with Integrals

Consider the problem Overrandomized. Intuitively, one can see something like Benford's law. Indeed, counting the leading digit works:

#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <unordered_map>
#include <unordered_set>
#include <utility>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

string Decode() {
unordered_map<char, int> char_counts; unordered_set<char> chars;
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) {
long long Q; string R; cin >> Q >> R;
char_counts[R[0]]++;
for (char c : R) chars.insert(c);
}
vector<pair<int, char>> count_chars;
for (const pair<char, int>& char_count : char_counts) {
count_chars.emplace_back(char_count.second, char_count.first);
}
sort(count_chars.begin(), count_chars.end());
string code;
for (const pair<int, char>& count_char : count_chars) {
code += count_char.second;
chars.erase(count_char.second);
}
code += *chars.begin();
reverse(code.begin(), code.end());
return code;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
ios::sync_with_stdio(false); cin.tie(NULL);
int T; cin >> T;
for (int t = 1; t <= T; ++t) {
int U; cin >> U;
cout << "Case #" << t << ": " << Decode() << '\n';
}
cout << flush;
return 0;
}


Take care to read Q as a long long because it can be large.

It occurred to me that there's no reason the logarithms of the randomly generated numbers should be uniformly distributed, so I decided to look into this probability distribution closer. Let $R$ be the random variable representing the return value of a query.

\begin{align*} P(R = r) &= \sum_{m = r}^{10^U - 1} P(M = m, R = r) \\ &= \sum_{m = r}^{10^U - 1} P(R = r \mid M = m)P(M = m) \\ &= \frac{1}{10^U - 1}\sum_{m = r}^{10^U - 1} \frac{1}{m}. \end{align*} since $P(M = m) = 1/(10^U - 1)$ for all $m$.

The probability that we get a $k$ digit number that starts with a digit $d$ is then \begin{align*} P(d \times 10^{k-1} \leq R < (d + 1) \times 10^{k-1}) &= \frac{1}{10^U - 1} \sum_{r = d \times 10^{k-1}}^{(d + 1) \times 10^{k-1} - 1} \sum_{m = r}^{10^U - 1} \frac{1}{m}. \end{align*}

Here, you can already see that for a fixed $k$, smaller $d$s will have more terms, so they should occur as leading digits with higher probability. It's interesting to try to figure out how much more frequently this should happen, though. To get rid of the summation, we can use integrals! This will make the computation tractable for large $k$ and $U$. Here, I start dropping the $-1$s in the approximations.

\begin{align*} P\left(d \times 10^{k-1} \leq R < (d + 1) \times 10^{k-1}\right) &= \frac{1}{10^U - 1} \sum_{r = d \times 10^{k-1}}^{(d + 1) \times 10^{k-1} - 1} \sum_{m = r}^{10^U - 1} \frac{1}{m} \\ &\approx \frac{1}{10^U} \sum_{r = d \times 10^{k-1}}^{(d + 1) \times 10^{k-1} - 1} \left[\log 10^U - \log r \right] \\ &=\frac{10^{k - 1}}{10^{U}}\left[ U\log 10 - \frac{1}{10^{k - 1}}\sum_{r = d \times 10^{k-1}}^{(d + 1) \times 10^{k-1} - 1} \log r \right]. \end{align*}

Again, we can apply integration. Using integration by parts, we have $\int_a^b x \log x \,dx = b\log b - b - \left(a\log a - a\right)$, so \begin{align*} \sum_{r = d \times 10^{k-1}}^{(d + 1) \times 10^{k-1} - 1} \log r &\approx 10^{k-1}\left[ (k - 1)\log 10 + (d + 1) \log (d + 1) - d \log d - 1 \right]. \end{align*}

Substituting, we end up with \begin{align*} P&\left(d \times 10^{k-1} \leq R < (d + 1) \times 10^{k-1}\right) \approx \\ &\frac{1}{10^{U - k + 1}}\left[ 1 + (U - k + 1)\log 10 - \left[(d + 1) \log(d+1) - d\log d\right] \right]. \end{align*}

We can make a few observations. Numbers with lots of digits are more likely to occur since for larger $k$, the denominator is much smaller. This makes sense: there are many more large numbers than small numbers. Independent of $k$, if $d$ is larger, the quantity inside the inner brackets is larger since $x \log x$ is convex, so the probability decreases with $d$. Thus, smaller digits occur more frequently. While the formula follows the spirit of Benford's law, the formula is not quite the same.

This was the first time I had to use integrals for a competitive programming problem!