#Galton board generator#

Much like the balls that drop “randomly” on Galton’s Board, most people will embody characteristics that fall close to the mean or the middle of the group.

Thus if you measure most human qualities, such as height, weight, intelligence, or any of a number of personality characteristics, you will find a normal distribution. This “chance” happenstance reflects the fact that the universe is not random or paraphrasing Einstein: “God did not play dice with the universe.” The laws of the universe not only govern the patterns of planets and solar systems, and electrons and protons, but the variability of human characteristics. Much like Galton’s board, many human characteristics fall into a normal distribution.

#Galton board generator#

The electronic version on this web page uses a random numbers generator to simulate the same process of the original board. Thus, we see a tendency for the balls to go toward the center and create what’s called a normal distribution, or bell-shaped curve. The probability that a ball would end up in an outer container is very small, since every time a ball hit a pin it would have to always go toward the “outer” direction if this was to occur.

Balls would be released from the funnel at the top of the board, have a 50-50 chance of going one way or another every time they would hit a pin, and eventually fall into their respective containers. This contraption was a manually made board consisting of a funnel at the top which held a number of balls (or beans), followed by a number of rows of pins, and concluding with a number of containers in which the balls would fall into. Galton’s Board, named after the English psychometrician Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), is also called a quincunx or bean machine.