Pachinko

Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly “inelastic” collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the binomial distribution, but what probability distributions result from different pin placements? In the 50-50 model, where the pins form a subset of this grid, not all probability distributions are possible, but surprisingly the uniform distribution is possible for {1,2,4,8,16} possible drop locations. Furthermore, every probability distribution can be approximated arbitrarily closely, and every dyadic probability distribution can be divided by a suitable power of 2 and then constructed exactly (along with extra “junk” outputs). In a more general model, if a ball hits a pin off center, it falls left or right accordingly. Then we prove a universality result: any distribution of n dyadic probabilities, each specified by k bits, can be constructed using O(nk2) pins, which is close to the information-theoretic lower bound of Ω(nk).