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posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2016, @10:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the something-to-think-about dept.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Do any of you have any noteworthy experiences where knowledge of math helped you in an unusual way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:43AM (#381476)

    Are you sure it isn't 2/3 change to get the car? You get the combined chance that it was behind the other two doors if you switch.

  • (Score: 2) by engblom on Friday July 29 2016, @10:44AM

    by engblom (556) on Friday July 29 2016, @10:44AM (#381477)

    You are actually right! 2/3 it is. Regardless, it is a win situation to switch door.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @02:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @02:33PM (#381545)

      Not always. Therein lies the violation of our intuition. If the contestant could intuitively pick the right door on the first try (something our intuition tells us we can do, regardless of the actual facts that the producers have set things up deliberately to make this effectively impossible), then switching would in fact be a lose situation. Statistically this will occur 1/3 of the time.

      So, if you're Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, you may wish to ignore the mathematical aspect of things and go with your instinct.

      As Han Solo said, "Never tell me the odds!"