Maker / Scenes / Spinning hexagon

What happens

The hexagon is 430 pixels from center to corner in a 1080×1920 frame. It starts turning at 1.3 radians per second, and every bounce makes it turn 1% faster, up to 3 radians per second. Gravity pulls the ball down the whole time. Because the walls are moving, a wall swinging into the ball throws it off faster than it arrived, so the bounces get livelier as the spin builds.

One wall has a gap in the middle, 16% of the wall's length. The ball only gets out if it reaches the gap while moving outward. Sometimes that happens on the first bounce, sometimes after a hundred: across variations 1 to 40 it took 1 to 109 bounces, with a median of 37. When a variation ends too quickly, Shuffle in the maker skips it and only lands on runs where the ball stays in for at least 12 seconds.

This is the ball-in-a-spinning-hexagon setup that turned into an informal coding test for AI models in early 2025, when people asked chatbots to write it and compared whose ball behaved. Here the physics runs at 960 steps a second, so the ball never tunnels through a wall.

What you hear

Each wall hit plays the next note of the melody on a sampled upright piano, panned toward the side of the hit. A bass line from the Minuet comes in under it. When the ball gets out, a quick arpeggio runs up and a chord rings out.

Songs that fit

The ball hits a wall about twice a second, and every note lands on a bounce, so the original rhythm of a tune is replaced by the rhythm of the bounces. Melodies made of even, steady notes survive that best. Minuet in G is the default for that reason, and Ode to Joy works almost as well. Tunes that depend on a rhythm, like the short-short-long of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, are harder to recognise.

Make your own

Open Spinning hexagon in the maker, pick a song or upload a MIDI file, and download the MP4. Variation 14 is the one in the preview above. The same variation number always gives the same video, so you can share a link and get identical results.

Other scenes

• Escape the rings: A ball bounces inside 22 spinning rings. Each ring has a gap, and the ring breaks once the ball gets through it.
• Galton board: 300 balls fall through 12 rows of pegs. Each bin has its own note, so you hear the bell curve fill in.
• Growing ball: The ball gets a little bigger on every bounce until it fills the circle.
• Every bounce adds a ball: Every bounce can add another ball, up to 200 of them, while a slowly widening gap lets them out.
• Shrinking ring: The ring gets 1.5% smaller every time it is hit, until the ball no longer fits.
• 100 strings: Each hit ties a string to the ring and speeds the ball up. The ring has to hold 100 of them.
• Color war: Two balls paint the ring in their own colour. Whoever owns more of it after 30 seconds wins.
• Ball race: Four balls, one small spinning exit. First one out wins.