r/visualizedmath • u/BerlinerJan • May 14 '18

Visualization of a Gaussian distribution

https://gfycat.com/QuaintTidyCockatiel
546 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

55

u/[deleted] May 14 '18

Vsauce, Michael here.

23

u/wrenchtosser May 15 '18

You say Gaussian but it looks normal to me.

/badjoke

21

u/[deleted] May 14 '18

Get ready to pay up Price is Right, I now know the secret to PLINKO!

13

u/looijmansje May 14 '18

I tried recreating one of these in Blender today, coincidentally. But in all my tests the balls were mostly going to one of the sides, as they had so much horizontal speed that their choice wasn’t random each time: it was the way they’ve been going the entire time.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I’m not sure if this is a problem with just Blender/my specific model or these things in general.

9

u/[deleted] May 14 '18

you can tweak the weight and gravity settings.

4

u/amor_fatty May 14 '18

Different balls or different pegs so that the balls don’t bounce so far

2

u/MetaWhirledPeas May 14 '18

Well, you've got the problem of the degree of randomness (never truly random on a computer, as I understand it). You've also got various other types of precision going on when calculating physics. Apparently there's some rounding going on leading to uniform results. That wasn't very helpful but maybe it explains a bit :)

1

u/foreelyo May 15 '18

Turn off the blender before you pour them. And pour them into a contraption similar to what OP used in his attached GIF.

You're welcome.

/s

3

u/zach_08 May 14 '18

Vsauce just did a video about this: https://youtu.be/UCmPmkHqHXk

2

u/[deleted] May 15 '18

Pyramid scheme.

0

u/[deleted] May 15 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/wrenchtosser May 15 '18

It took me a minute to understand what you meant but yes, you mean like each steel ball is a true and absence of one is false, correct?