Probabilistic Modeling—From Physics to Computing Science
K.C. Lam · The American Statistician · 1983
It is important in computing science to estimate the number of data blocks needed to answer a query. Three different answers to this problem emerged respectively in 1975, 1977, and 1982. This article investigates the basic differences of the three models and observes that the same differences were shared a long time ago by the physicists who used different models for the behavior of elementary particles to obtain the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, the Bose-Einstein statistics, and the Fermi-Dirac statistics.