Magic 8 Ball
Type a yes-or-no question, shake the ball, and read the answer in the window. This one gives the twenty classic answers in their real proportions, ten yes, five vague and five no, and draws each shake from your browser's cryptographic random generator, so every answer has the same one-in-twenty chance and the wobble cannot change what was already drawn. The full list of answers is on this page, sorted by tone, for the people who came to see it. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is saved: the question stays in this tab.
No shake yet. Type a yes-or-no question, then press Shake or the space bar.
Press Space anywhere outside the field, or Enter inside it, to shake without reaching for the mouse. The answer is drawn before the ball moves, so the wobble cannot change it, and each of the twenty answers has the same one-in-twenty chance every time. Questions stay in this tab and are not kept; the limit is 200 characters.
Every answer the ball can give
The twenty answers of the classic toy, sorted by tone. Ten are a yes, five are a maybe and five are a no, so a shake is a yes half the time. The ball on this page draws from this list with an equal chance for every entry.
| Yes (10) | Vague (5) | No (5) |
|---|---|---|
| It is certain | Reply hazy, try again | Don't count on it |
| It is decidedly so | Ask again later | My reply is no |
| Without a doubt | Better not tell you now | My sources say no |
| Yes definitely | Cannot predict now | Outlook not so good |
| You may rely on it | Concentrate and ask again | Very doubtful |
| As I see it, yes | ||
| Most likely | ||
| Outlook good | ||
| Yes | ||
| Signs point to yes |
Common questions
- What are the 20 Magic 8 Ball answers?
- The toy's twenty-sided die carries ten affirmative answers, five non-committal ones and five negative ones. The yes answers are It is certain, It is decidedly so, Without a doubt, Yes definitely, You may rely on it, As I see it yes, Most likely, Outlook good, Yes, and Signs point to yes. The vague ones are Reply hazy try again, Ask again later, Better not tell you now, Cannot predict now, and Concentrate and ask again. The no answers are Don't count on it, My reply is no, My sources say no, Outlook not so good, and Very doubtful. All twenty are in the table under the tool, one column per tone, and the ball on this page uses exactly that list and nothing else.
- What are the odds of getting a yes?
- Ten in twenty, or 50 percent. A vague answer is five in twenty, 25 percent, and a no is five in twenty, 25 percent. Each individual answer has a one-in-twenty chance, 5 percent, on every shake, because the ball draws one index over the whole list rather than choosing a tone first. That is the same as the physical toy, where each of the twenty faces of the floating die is equally likely to come up against the window. Shaking again does not change the odds: every shake is a fresh draw.
- Is the answer really random?
- Yes, in the strongest sense a browser can offer. The index is taken from crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographic generator, and mapped onto the twenty answers by rejection sampling rather than a remainder. A remainder would hand the first few answers a fractionally better chance, because two to the power thirty-two is not a multiple of twenty; draws that would cause that tilt are thrown away and redrawn instead. The answer is decided the moment you press Shake, before the ball starts to move, and the wobble is a fixed animation over a result that is already settled. No server is involved and nothing you type is read by the draw.
- Can I ask it anything?
- Anything up to 200 characters, but the ball only has yes, no and maybe in its vocabulary, so a yes-or-no question gets a sensible reply and an open question gets a strange one. It knows nothing about what you asked: the question is never read by the draw, so the same question shaken twice can get opposite answers, which is the whole joke of the toy. Ask about lunch, the weather or who should go first. For anything that matters, use it to notice how you feel about the answer, not as the answer.
- Does the ball remember my question or my answers?
- No. The question stays in the field in this tab and is not saved, not sent anywhere and not kept after you close the page. The line under the ball shows the latest answer and counts the shakes in this visit, and that count starts again at one when the page is reloaded. There is no history, no account and no cookie for the tool, because a question to a toy is not a record anyone needs kept.
- How do I shake it without the mouse?
- Press the space bar anywhere on the page outside the question field, or press Enter while typing in the field. On a phone or tablet, tap Shake. If you have asked your browser to reduce motion, the ball does not wobble and the answer appears at once, which is the same draw with the theatre left out. Copy answer puts the answer text on the clipboard so you can paste it into a message.
Every shake picks one of the twenty classic answers with an equal chance, from the browser's cryptographic random generator, so the odds are ten in twenty for a yes, five for a vague reply and five for a no. It is a toy: it knows nothing about your question.