Encyclopedia > Bean machine

  Article Content

Bean machine

The Bean Machine, also known as the Quincunx, is a device invented by Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the law of error and the normal distribution.

The machine consists of a vertical board with interleaved rows of pins. Balls are dropped from the top, and bounce randomly left and right as they hit the pins. Eventually, they are collected into one-ball-wide bins at the bottom. The height of ball columns in the bins approximates a bell curve.

See also: pachinko

External links



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Grand Prix

... dumped 2003-03-17 with ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 29.3 ms