Cascading Galton Boards: Difference between revisions

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Children struggle to learn basic ideas of probability distributions and sampling, despite the fact that we see these around us all the time. The Galton Board (see galtonboard.com) is an elegant and intuitive mechanical simulation that makes the origin of Gaussian distributions very clear. Unfortunately physical Galton Boards are costly to build. Your task is to make a customisable animated simulation - but not just of a single distribution. Users should be able to chain multiple boards together, associating them with descriptive equations, creating a visual probabilistic programming language that implements Gaussian kernels as a zoomable giant pinball machine that can help teach conditional probability and an intuitive derivation of Bayes theorem.
Children struggle to learn basic ideas of probability distributions and sampling, despite the fact that we see these around us all the time. The Galton Board (see galtonboard.com) is an elegant and intuitive mechanical simulation that makes the origin of Gaussian distributions very clear. Unfortunately physical Galton Boards are costly to build. Your task is to make a customisable animated simulation - but not just of a single distribution. Users should be able to chain multiple boards together, associating them with descriptive equations, creating a visual probabilistic programming language that implements composition of Gaussian kernels as a zoomable giant pinball machine that can help teach conditional probability and an intuitive derivation of Bayes theorem.

Revision as of 08:13, 19 October 2020

Children struggle to learn basic ideas of probability distributions and sampling, despite the fact that we see these around us all the time. The Galton Board (see galtonboard.com) is an elegant and intuitive mechanical simulation that makes the origin of Gaussian distributions very clear. Unfortunately physical Galton Boards are costly to build. Your task is to make a customisable animated simulation - but not just of a single distribution. Users should be able to chain multiple boards together, associating them with descriptive equations, creating a visual probabilistic programming language that implements composition of Gaussian kernels as a zoomable giant pinball machine that can help teach conditional probability and an intuitive derivation of Bayes theorem.