Detecting Fraud

Looking Out For Number One

Andrew Rosen
stolen adapted shamelessly coopted from Steve Wolfman’s assignment.

Abstract
This is a multipart assignment designed to teach you how to cre-
ate small, reusable functions. The first part serves as an primer on
writing small methods, the second as array/list practice, the third as
file-reading and application, and the fourth as science.

Hidden patterns
Our world is controlled by mathematics – just ask any physicist. Sometimes
math can be beautiful, such as when the golden ratio crops up in nature.
This assignment asks what does the number of social media posts each
day, the population of every town in the US, the address of every faculty
member of Temple, and the size of tallest 100 buildings have in common?
Please utilize the discussion board on Canvas for this assign-
ment. Some parts are tricky, and I encourage you to ask your classmates
for help. The final part of this project requires you to post your dataset on
the message board.

0.1 Assignment
The end goal of this program is to write a program that determines the
distribution of initial digits in a set of data. In the end, we want a program
that reads in a number n and a list of numbers nums and outputs an nth of
10 values: the frequency with which each digit 0-9 appears as the nth digit
of one of the input numbers. However, we’ll break that problem down into
easier steps.
(Note: throughout this problem, you may assume that the numbers
processed are non-negative or you can use the absolute value function to
help you handle negative numbers in a reasonable way.)

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1 Review
1.1 Count Digits
We’ll start out with something we’ve done in class before. Write a function
countDigits which takes in an int num, which will return the number of
digits in num. For example countDigits should evaluate to:

• 1 for numbers 0–9,

• 2 for numbers 10–99,

• 3 for numbers 100–999, etc

Remember, use repeated division by 10 to calculate the number of digits

in num. (There’s also a tricky solution using logarithms that avoids the
repeated division!)

1.2 nth Digit Back

Write a method nthDigitBack which takes in two ints, n and num. This
method finds the nth lowest order digit in num. In other words, nthDigitBack
returns the nth digit from the right. The rightmost digit is considered the
0th digit back. nthDigitBack should evaluate to 0 for digits out of range
(so if you ask for the 1000th digit back of 7546, nthDigitBack will return
0). Here are some example method calls of nthDigitBack:

• nthDigitBack(0,123) ⇒ 3

• nthDigitBack(1,123) ⇒ 2

• nthDigitBack(2,123) ⇒ 1

• nthDigitBack(3,123) ⇒ 0

• nthDigitBack(0,0) ⇒ 0

• nthDigitBack(3,18023) ⇒ 8

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1.3 nthDigit
Write a function nthDigit, which takes in two ints, n and num, and returns
the nth highest order digit of num. In other words, this method returns the
nth digit from the left, as opposed to nthDigitBack, which returns the nth
digit from the right. The leftmost digit is considered the 0th digit here. Just
like nethDigitBack, nthDigit should evaluate to 0 for digits beyond the
”end” of the number.
If nthDigit calls nthDigitBack and countDigits, you can do the entire
method in one line. Think about how to convert the problem of the nth digit
from the left into finding the same digit, but going from the right.
Example method calls:

• nthDigit(0,123) ⇒ 1

• nthDigit(1,123) ⇒ 2

• nthDigit(2,123) ⇒ 3

• nthDigit(3,123) ⇒ 0

• nthDigit(0,0) ⇒ 0

• nthDigit(3,18023) ⇒ 2

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2 list Practice
2.1 Update Tally
Write a method called updateTally, which calls nthDigit. updateTally
takes in three arguments, an int n, an int num, and an int[] tally. We
assume that tally is a int[] of 10 integers. The tally contains the tally of
the number of nth digits seen so far. It updates tally to reflect the nth digit
of num.
In other words, if 5 is the nth digit of num, we increment index 5 of
tally. If 2 is the nth digit of num, we increment index 2 of tally. If d is the
nth digit of num, we increment index d of tally.
Examples showing how tally changes, where tally has an initial value of
[0,0,1,2,0,0,3,0,9,0] in each example:

• updateTally(2, 1072, tally)

⇒ tally is now [0,0,1,2,0,0,3,1,9,0]

• updateTally(0, 2541, tally)

⇒ tally is now [0,0,2,2,0,0,3,0,9,0]

Remember, since we are modifying tally, updateTally will be a void

method which returns nothing.

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2.2 nth Digit Tally
Write a method called nthDigitTally, which calls updateTally. The
method takes in two arguments: int n, which is the digit we are inter-
ested in, and an int[] nums, which is an list of numbers. nthDigitTally
returns a tally of frequencies of 0–9 as the nth digit of all the numbers in
nums.
Here’s a sample test case. These are enrollments in Research Triangle
Park colleges and universities in Fall 2000. 1

Institution Enrollment
Duke University 12176
North Carolina Central University 5476
Louisburg College (Junior College) 543
Campbell University 3490
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 24892
North Carolina State University 28619
Meredith College 2595
Peace College 603
Shaw University 2527
St. Augustine’s College 1465
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary 1858

Assume the variable enrollments contains the enrollment numbers from

that table. Then: nthDigitTally(0, enrollments) ⇒ [0,3,4,1,0,2,1,0,0,0]
This is because none of the enrollment numbers begin with 0, three begin
with 1, four begin with 2, one begins with 3, and so on.

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source http://www.researchtriangle.org/data/enrollment.html)

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3 Reading Data
You will need to utilize Scanner to

3.1 Read Data

Write a method readMysteriousNumbers that reads whitespace-separated
integers from a file and returns an list of numbers suitable as input to
nthDigitTally. Here’s the university enrollment data from above:

12176
5476
543
3490
24892
28619
2595
603
2527
1465
1858

If the above is entered stored in a file and given to readMysteriousNumbers,

the method should return the list [12176, 5476, 543, 3490, 24892, 28619,
2595, 603, 2527, 1465, 1858].

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3.2 Main
Finally, write your main method to read a number n from input. You can
let a user enter a file name of a dataset or you can automatically use one.
The program should tally the nth digits of the numbers in the data set and
print out a table of the results. For example, given:

0
enrollment.txt

where enrollment.txt is our example enrollment data, your program should

print:

0s: 0
1s: 3
2s: 4
3s: 1
4s: 0
5s: 2
6s: 1
7s: 0
8s: 0
9s: 0

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4 The Reveal and Submitting
So it works. Now what?

4.1 Make Observations

We will now use our program to explore a hidden pattern that occurs for
large sets of numbers.
Take a look at what happens to the first digit of items in a large dataset.

1. Test you program on one of my posted datasets. Alternatively, for the

full 100 points, find a data source on the web that no one else has
used (see next part) and transform it into a format suitable for input
to readMysteriousNumbers. The data must all be separate measure-
ments of a single type of phenomenon. For example: measurements of
university/college enrollments across different institutions (like above)
or at the same institution across different years; measurements of the
flow rates of all the major rivers in the United States; measurements of
the height of 10000 randomly chosen Philadelphians; the karma value
of the top posts on Reddit; measurements of the length in characters of
each article in the Wikipedia; measurements of the population of the
1000 largest cities and townships in Japan; etc. Furthermore, there
must be at least 250 measurements in the list (but more would
be better!).

2. Go to canvas.temple.edu and find the “discussions” tab in the course

sidebar. Find the discussion I created with the title “Mysterious Num-
bers Discussion.” Post all of the following items to the discussion with:
the URL for your data source, a description of the data source, and
one attachment with data suitable for readMysteriousNumbers.

3. On the assignment dropbox, submit with your assignment the URL

of your data, a description of the data source, and digit tallies for
digit 1 and digit 2 of your data (using nthDigitTally). Are there any
oddities in the tallies? Anything interesting? What about in other
students’ data?