Learn

The maths and code behind every video, explained in plain words.

• Why does plinko make a bell curve?Plinko and Galton board balls pile up in a bell curve because every peg is a left-or-right choice. Here is the maths with a live simulation.
• How can a bouncing ball play a song?In our guess-the-song videos every bounce plays the next note of a melody. Here is how the ball, the notes and the beat are connected.
• Why does the ball take so long to escape the rings?A ball inside spinning rings with a gap can take many seconds to escape. The gap size and spin speed explain why, with the numbers from our simulation.
• Deterministic physics: why our simulations never changeOur ball simulations play out identically every time because of a fixed random seed and a fixed time step. Here is why that matters.
• Exponential growth: why the ball suddenly fills the screenA ball that grows 7% every bounce looks slow at first and then suddenly explodes. The maths of exponential growth explains it.