Exhibit: Probability Pattern

Is it possible guess where the balls will land? Not accurately, but we can at least say where they are most ‘likely’ to land.

This is called Probability and this kind of pattern is called Pascal’s Triangle, named after the French Mathematician Blaise Pascal. The balls have, at each junction, an equal chance to go in either direction. This means the chance of them going in the same direction is increasingly small.

It tells us that if you put in 64 balls, 20 should land in the middle and 1 should land either side. The balls travel up a plastic tube using air pressure created from a fan in the basement. They go into the top of the triangle, seemingly at random and then make their way down one of the tubes.