Re: What makes a pinball go in different directions launched at the same streng

Hello April,
     Thank you for your question. There are several things that need to 
fall into place in order for something to be completely pridictable. All 
of the forces taken into consideration must be able to be recorded with 
perfect accuracy. If one thinks about this for a minute, it will stand to 
reason that their are not many things in our world that can be completely 
reasoned out. In every industry there is a great deal of testing that must 
be performed on a product before it is sent to market, despite the 
brilliant "paper work" that goes into the modeling of a product. For 
instance, a team of highly educated engineers and scientists will spend 
many months and sometimes years designing a car, only to discover that 
testing brings out unanticipated flaws. The point that I am really trying 
to make is that very few things are perfectly predictable, even when 
people are trying to make them predictable. In a pinball game, the 
manufacturer does not want the game to be predictable (that wouldn't make 
for a very interesting game) therefore they simply create the game and by 
nature it is unpredictable. Some of the things that make it unpredictable 
are the manufacturing imperfections, the aerodynamics of the ball (which, 
by the way, aerodynamics are still largely experimental). The force of 
which the ball is hit by the stopper can be affected by everthing from the 
temperature in the room to the humidity. And of course if the starting 
point is subjected to a random force, the rest of the entire game is 
subjected to complete unpredictability.
      Hope this helps.

Sincerely,
Norman L. Parker