Building Ruin

The concept

Ruin is a fictional teaching piece for a probability studio — a single, unhurried demonstration that a fair-looking game with a small edge ends in ruin almost every time. Its one job: make the invisible drift of a house edge visible as a leaning fan of paths, with the exact probability of ruin printed and the ensemble converging on it.

The resting state is deliberately mid-story: one bold walk is already part-way down inside the ghost cloud, so a still capture reads as a live game, never a blank waiting for input.

Palette — argued from the felt

Following the collection's ink/line split: the bright mark green (#8FB08A) draws strokes only; copy sits in cloth-ink (#DDE4D6) and its dimmed variants, all cleared for contrast on the felt.

Type

Archivo — a grotesque with tight, confident caps — carries the wordmark and headlines; its condensed energy suits a subject about odds and edges. IBM Plex Mono runs every number: the live stake, the step count, and the two ruin probabilities. A monospace makes converging figures sit still enough to read while they tick.

Technique — the signature

Everything is one canvas 2D layer; no libraries. The signature is one doomed walk inside a fan of every path it could have taken, built from an ensemble of independent random walks:

Each walk holds a running stake and its full history of steps. Every frame it takes one even-money bet — +1 with probability p, −1 otherwise — and is absorbed the instant it touches 0 (ruin) or N=100 (target). Eighty ghost walks run continuously at low alpha, respawning the moment they are absorbed, so the cloud is always full and shimmering. One bold walk is drawn thick and bright on top; its head warms from sage toward barrier-red as it nears zero. When it is absorbed the barrier flashes, holds, and a fresh stake begins.

Two numbers tell the story. The theoretical ruin probability comes straight from the classic formula — for an unfair coin, P(ruin) = 1 − (1−r^i)/(1−r^N) with r=(1−p)/p, i the stake. The empirical figure is just ruined ÷ absorbed across the whole ensemble, and it visibly crawls toward the theoretical value as walks pile up — chance becoming law on the far side of the noise. The three house-edge chips re-seed the ensemble and re-tilt the entire fan.

Canvas discipline throughout: DPR capped at 2, sized to its container with a debounced resize that remaps step/stake space to pixels (no data lost), the rAF loop paused on document.hidden, and a prefers-reduced-motion path that warms the ensemble to steady state and paints a single settled frame instead of animating.

Iteration log