Talk:Square root biased sampling

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A fact from Square root biased sampling appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 December 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know
- ... that square root biased sampling was originally developed as a way to sample long sequences of DNA?
A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/December.

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Why square root?

Could an explanation be included as to why square root was chosen? (Say, versus a straight n, or cube root, or natural log, etc.) What properties does the square root have that optimizes sampling? (What makes it "mathematically efficient"?) -- 128.104.112.95 (talk) 17:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]