What's going on?
- Every time you click
, the box moves in a random direction: left or right, with 50/50 chance.
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As we keep doing more and more steps, the box performs a 'random walk'.
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Even though this process is random, there is a lot of structure hidden inside it.
Things to try
- Try increasing the number of boxes, say, 20000.
- Now make them all do random walks at the same time. (They are independent, i.e. doing their own thing).
- Do you see the Gaussian distribution (bell curve)?
Further reading
Look up the following terms:
- Heat equation
- Random Walk
- Gaussian Distribution
- Central Limit Theorem