Inaccurate Ball Physics

[Sam-Belliveau]

I have been using this code:

for (var i = 0; i < 1000; ++i) {
    document.querySelector("body > div > div.relative.flex.min-h-dvh.w-full.flex-col > div > div > div > div.flex.flex-col.gap-5.bg-slate-700.p-3.lg\\:max-w-80 > button").click()
}

to drop thousands of 1 dollar balls and I notice that the average return is positive. This means that balls are not falling along a normal distribution.

What plinko does is calculate which bucket it should land in before using a standard binomial distribution. (i believe they generate 16 bits and count the 1's) and then they play an animation of a ball landing in that bucket.

i.e. they record millions of balls falling and categorize what bucket they fell into so they can play it back when that bucket is selected by the more accurate random number generator.

using physics to do the randomness leads to inaccurate returns.

[AnsonH]

Hi, yes indeed I've noticed this problem.

You can tweak the bin multipliers to make sure the weighted expected value is less than one (that's how the house earn money). I didn't do that since I want to be faithful to Stake's original bin multipliers, and honestly my game is not about making money so the expected value doesn't matter too much 😄