ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Quincunx

Have you ever played a game where you drop a coin or a ball through a peg board and it bounces around, landing in different slots at the bottom? That's sort of like what a quincunx is.

A quincunx is a board with a lot of little pegs sticking out of it. You drop something, like a bead or a ball, at the top of the board and it bounces off the pegs as it falls down. The pegs make the ball bounce in different directions, so it doesn't fall straight down like gravity wants it to.

At the bottom of the quincunx board, there are slots where the ball can end up. Because the ball bounces around so much, it's hard to predict which slot it will fall into. That's why the quincunx is sometimes called a "bean machine" or a "Galton board", because it was invented by a guy named Sir Francis Galton to help him study probability.

The quincunx is a fun way to learn about probability, because you can see that even though it's hard to predict exactly where the ball will end up, there are some slots that it's more likely to land in than others, just because of the way the pegs are set up. So, you can study the quincunx to learn more about randomness, chance, and probability.