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Vibe Lab·GALTON

Drop a ball, watch a bell curve grow

Sixteen rows of pegs, one ball at a time. Each peg flips the ball left or right with a coin-flip’s odds. Drop a thousand balls and the heap at the bottom doesn’t pile up where you expect — it spreads out into a beautiful bell shape. Tap anywhere on the canvas to dump eighteen balls right under your finger; tap off-center to skew the bell. The same shape that polling margins, GPS error and the heights of every kid in your class come from — just made out of pixels and gravity.

What it does

Every ball does a 16-step random walk: at each peg row it bounces ±3 pixels with 50/50 probability. Sixteen coin flips give a binomial distribution; multiply by 5,000 balls and the histogram smooths into a Gaussian bell. The bins auto-rescale so the tallest bar always touches the top — kids see the SHAPE of the curve, not its absolute count.

In the real world

Sir Francis Galton built the first bean machine out of wood in the 1870s to convince Victorian statisticians that lots of small random nudges add up to one predictable shape. The same Central Limit Theorem governs polling margins of error, brewery quality control, GPS positioning spread, the distribution of human heights, and almost every “bell curve” you’ll meet in school.

Painted with these colors

Every VibeBoy lab paints with these 16 colors — the same palette PICO-8 made famous. Constraints are what make pixel art feel like pixel art.

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