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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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Get Those Brain Cells Working: The Monty Hall Problem
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @08:57PM
> thousands of mathematical academics telling the woman with the world's highest IQ that she was wrong. And she wasn't.
Some of those probably got the problem second-hand. I know the formulation I got at first was not her full description and had a different conclusion (they hadn't specified he wouldn't open the door I had initially picked IIRC, and said he'd "randomly choose a door with a goat" which retains 50/50 if your door isn't opened and your choice between remainders is 50/50 if your door is opened - yes, really, it's a very different problem). Then their explanation of why it was so didn't make sense and I was left thinking this problem was a stupid fake for yeaaaars until I read the correct formulation, which is transparent to graph theory students. Which, thanks to Martin Gardner, I had unwittingly been since a pre-teen. And I was left SUPER frustrated at the person who presented it to me in the end, as the disinformation was mental muck that took some years to clear.
tl;dr - the monte hall problem is misdescribed sometimes too. :(