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Get Those Brain Cells Working: The Monty Hall Problem

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Mathematics (Score: 3, Informative) by JeanCroix on Friday July 29 2016, @01:15PM

  by JeanCroix (573) on Friday July 29 2016, @01:15PM (#381516)

  In a sense, I think it's the low sample size (i.e. only 3 doors) that works against intuition in this problem. As stated in the wiki article, if one considers a larger number of doors (and assuming Monty opens all but one of them before the offer to switch), it becomes much more intuitive that switching is nominal.

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