Today we did the experiment that models radioactive decay. We have wooden cubes with one side coloured in. All 30 dice are thrown together. The ones that fall with the coloured-in side upwards are deemed to have decayed and are thus removed from the set. The rest of the dice are thrown again and so the pattern repeats. We count the number of dice left in each time and plot a graph of that against throw number. The result is an almost exponential graph but with a lot of anomalies because the sample size is so small. Today one team did something I've never seen before:
They stacked up the dice removed each time to make a 3D bar graph of dice removed against throw number (on the horizontal axis). In theory, 1/6 of the number of dice thrown should be removed each time. This worked on the first go because 5 is 1/6 of 30. That left 25 dice to throw and 1/6 of 25 would have meant 4 dice removed on the second go. That clearly didn't happen. But the trend is towards an exponential decay graph. A much larger number of dice would be needed to get a truer pattern. I thought this was a wonderful way of presenting the data. :D
