Material Detail

Let 1, 100 or 1,000 steel balls fall through up to 14 rows of pins and watch the bins fill toward the binomial distribution and the normal curve. Change the chance p that a pin sends a ball right, or replace each coin toss with a die or a uniform nudge to see the central limit theorem at work; readouts give the mean and variance beside their exact values. The page counts the paths to each bin, follows the idea from de Moivre (1733) to Galton's 1873 quincunx, explains where real boards depart from the ideal, and notes what the theorem does not say: not every quantity is normal, and heavy-tailed data are common.

One plate of Laplace's Mini World, a free, non-commercial collection of 130 interactive 3D models in English and Chinese. No account or ads. Text, pictures and models are CC BY-NC 4.0.

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