$\DeclareMathOperator{\p}{Pr}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\P}{Pr}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\c}{^C}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\or}{ or}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\and}{ and}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\var}{Var}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\E}{E}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\std}{Std}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\Ber}{Bern}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\Bin}{Bin}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\Poi}{Poi}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\Uni}{Uni}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\Exp}{Exp}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\N}{N}$ $\DeclareMathOperator{\R}{\mathbb{R}}$ $\newcommand{\d}{\, d}$

See the Pen Galton board by Chris Piech (@piech) on CodePen.


Let $B$ be the bucket index that a ball falls into. If you think about it, in a Galton Board, the bucket index is equal to the number of times that a ball goes "right". If it goes right 0 times, it falls into bucket 0. If it goes right 8 times, it falls into bucket 8.

Every ball has 8 chances to go right, and each chance has equal probability of going right or left. If we consider going "right" as a success, we can cast our variable $B$ into the language of a Binomial Random Variable. $B$ equals the number of "successes" in 8 independent trials.

Thus $B$ ~ $\text{Bin}(n=8, p = 0.5)$. We can use the probability mass function of a Binomial to predict the probability of any ball falling into a bucket (which is the same as the fraction of balls that will fall in the bucket).