Place ramps and flip-flopping bits so a cascade of falling marbles outputs exactly the right left/right stream.
Drop marbles through a grid you wire with ramps, bits, crossovers and interceptors. Each marble exits left (0) or right (1) of the divider; arrange your pieces so the output sequence on the scope matches the orange target waveform.
Cascade Engine is a marble-machine take on digital logic and binary counting, making the building blocks of computers tangible.
The parts — ramps, bits, crossovers and interceptors, with marbles exiting left for 0 and right for 1 — are Turing Tumble's, a physical game that demonstrates logic gates through mechanical computing.
The point it makes is that computation needs no electricity. A "bit" here is a physical flip-flop that remembers which way the last marble went, and a run of them counts in binary because that is simply what a chain of flip-flops does.
Matching an output waveform rather than solving a stated sum is the sharper version of the lesson. You are not being asked to compute a number but to build a machine whose behaviour over time is correct — which is the actual job.
Cascade Engine is a marble-machine take on digital logic and binary counting. It is an original, free browser puzzle game built in-house for PlayPendium.