system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do formulas in computer science always have tons of logs in them?

I feel like every time I see a formula describing something in computer science it has something like logloglog(x/y) or something like that in it. Why are logarithms so prevalent in these equations?
gpt
There are two big sources of logarithms in CS. The first is binary representation: The (base-2) logarithm of N is the number of bits you need to encode N in binary. The second in binary trees: The depth of a (balanced) binary tree is the logarithm of the number of elements. Those two concepts are pretty ubiquitous across the subject.