If you've ever played with one of those coin vortex things
you may have tried to hit one of the circling coins with
another coin to see if you could knock it off its path and
directly into the hole at the bottom.
That's
the principal here.
The goal is to use the cue ball to hit one of your
moving
balls off its course and into the hole at the bottom
before
it hits a series of holes above the bottom hole through
which it exits the table and is recycled back onto the
cone
at the top. The holes above the bottom hole are
arranged
such that the ball will exit horizontally through these
vertically arranged holes if allowed to continue on their
circling path.
If you do manage to hit your moving ball such that it
breaks from its orbital path and drops into the bottom
hole, your cue ball would obviously follow it. The cue
ball
is then sorted by a standard cue ball separation
mechanism
where it is returned for the next shot. Likewise if you
miss
and your cue ball goes directly into the hole.
To start the game, you'd drop the balls into a hopper
where they are randomly shot out establishing a pattern
of swirling balls that's different each time.
Although the balls are in movement, their relationship to
one another remains the same through the game until
they are hit by one of the players, either hard enough
and at the right angle to knock it into the bottom hole or
just hit so that it changes its orbital path.
The top lip of the vortex would extend into a flattened
round table from which you'd launch your cue ball with a
standard pool cue stick. So you'd pick one of the circling
balls, calculate your intersect path, wait till the ball you
wanted got to where you think you could hit it at the
right angle and shoot. Of course you risk hitting the
other players balls and knocking them in just as with a
regular pool game so you'd be playing pool in 4
dimensions as opposed to regular pool only being played
in 2 dimensions.