Ping? Pong!
Wow! It looks like I’m not the only one who’s been playing with Ping Pong Balls. A few intrepid adventurers visited my blog and viewed the YouTube video of my ping pong ball prototype RBS. A couple of the good folks over at the RollingBallScuptures group wrote back with suggestions and comments - thanks! pasodad not only gave me good feedback in his post, he also gave me a great pointer to the website of a magically active mind in Norway. Helge Rustad’s website has lots of mirthful makings, including his Ping Pong Ball Computer and Ping Pong Ball Clock. I really like the way he’s made “registers” for the ping pong ball adder. I’m also absolutely mirthful over the circular RBS that rotates around and around! What a wonderful idea!
I’ve been ruminating upon ways to make the proposed acylic & ping pong ball RBS more interesting by adding some complexity. I think that by adapting some of Helge’s techniques for building “registers” I can get some very interesting results.
I think I’ll take a shot at designing a walking ring counter using ping pong ball registers. If successful then I could extend that concept to make a random number generator, which could then direct the ping pong balls through all the paths in the RBS in a pseudorandom cycle. This interests me a great deal because:
- it insures that all paths in the RBS are taken. My intent here is to have balls active on as many tracks as possible at the same time, thus increasing interest and mirthfulness.
- not only are all paths taken, they’re exercised in a pattern that appears random to the observer. Given a walking ring counter of 16 stages, and assuming that you launch another ball on its way once every second, it would take over nine hours for the pattern to repeat. Now there’s some magic for you! Even the most tireless observer will most likely not linger for over nine hours!
- the addition of the pseudo random number generator itself will add mirth and magic to the RBS
So, looks like it’s off to the drawing board for me! I’ll let you know what I come up with!
Mirth Maker
