[whoisburbansky]

> While power law and fractal patterns have revealed themselves in several physical, biological, and man-made phenomena, to our knowledge we are the first to identify their presence in machine-code sequences in computer executable code. Presumably, machine code is a human expression of instructions to a computer and it is well established that all human languages show a power-law in the frequency of the words.

Made me chuckle. Maybe the authors should look at getting an ACM subscription.

[https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1391984.1391986]

[bangara]

It is an over claim to attribute the findings in the blog here to the "Power Laws in Software" paper published in 2008 at ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. The ACM paper is casting a wide net on many places where distributions show power law in software and is focused on software modules/libraries/classes and their dependencies. There is a mention of CPU ISA using instruction frequency in CISC architectures but no in-depth treatment of the subject. This blog focuses on the machine instructions and analyzes just not instruction frequency but a whole sequence of instructions and their frequencies plus their lengths in an exhaustive manner.