A very interesting qunicunx or Galton board illustration by Bob O'Keefe and Springer publishers from a few years back. Most obvious is the segregation of the colors. What could cause this? Perhaps a magnet? May the force be with you!
More subtle is the resulting distribution. It should look more bell-shaped rather than this triangular shape. You could get a triangular distribution from the sum of two uniform random variables, but it would require not pins to jostle the balls, no central hole for them to fall through, and a more symmetric supply of black and white balls. Something like this..
Imagine someone has loaded the balls in the equal-sided diamond-shape shown. The balls are held, waiting to fall above the the v-shaped retainer. Suppose the the entire retainer is removed, all at once. The balls fall straight down, through the slots, into the waiting bins below. The retainer is then replaced and refilled with balls. This is the image we see. This would achieve the resulting triangular distribution.
This, of course, still doesn't explain the segregation of the colors!
1 comment:
Perhaps the segregation of colors was simply by chance!
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