Roeder, writing for fivethirtyeight.com, has come up with a new way to illustrate the Central Limit Theorem.
And it uses Plinko, the beloved The Price is Right game!
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| http://www.businessinsider.com/price-is-right-contestant-plinko-record-2017-5 |
Well, a variation upon Plinko, featured on the NBC game show The Wall. Their Plinko is much larger and more dramatic and the slots at the bottom go up to $1 million. See below.
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| http://selenahughes.com/1553-2/ |
How does CLT come into play? Well, the ball is randomly thrown down The Wall. And people jump around and hope for certain outcomes. But what outcome is most likely over time? For the pattern of ending positions to conform to the normal curve. Which it did. See below.
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| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-god-were-a-giant-game-of-plinko/ |
The article itself gets pretty spiritual as the author starts talking about randomness, of the show and of life. You can steal, but cite, the game show as example of CLT as he has provided a clip of the show as well as a graph of positions of the orbs, both of which help illustrate the theorem.
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