How to play
Four balls, red, blue, green and gold, start in the middle of a ring that has one gap in it. Pick the color you think will get out first. The ring turns slowly, the balls bounce around, and the first one to slip through the gap wins the round. Play five rounds and see how many you call right.
Is it rigged?
People ask this under our videos all the time, so here is exactly how it works. Nothing about your pick changes what happens next.
- Every ball starts near the center with a random direction and a slightly different speed.
- Each time a ball hits the ring it bounces like a mirror, then turns by a small random angle, never more than about 7 degrees. Without that nudge some rounds could loop forever.
- The gap starts at about 36 degrees wide and slowly opens up to about 80, so every round ends within a few seconds.
With four balls, each one has the same one-in-four chance. Over five rounds the average score is a little over one win, and getting four or five is genuinely rare. That is the fun of it: it's a pure luck test, and the physics shows you honestly who got out.
Why a gap in a ring?
A ball trapped in a ring with a single way out is one of the most watched ideas in physics-simulation videos. The tension comes from near misses: a ball skims the edge of the gap and bounces back in. The ring turns so the gap keeps moving, which means no ball has a fixed advantage just because of where it started.
Sound
Each bounce plays a short note from a five-note scale, picked at random, so a busy round turns into a little tune. Like everything on this site, it is synthesized in your browser; there are no recordings.