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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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To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
-- Shelley
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30 2016, @09:49AM
"I still don't get this."
No, you sure don't. I knew there would be at least one of you popping up.
It's simple. There are a billion doors and only one car. You pick a door. Is the car behind it? Of course not. There's a goat behind your door. Now the host offers you the chance to have whatever is behind ALL of the remaining doors. The host even generously offers to take the 999,999,998 goats that are behind those 999,999,999 doors off your hands, leaving you with just the car. So do you accept the offer? OF COURSE YOU DO.
What's that? It's only three doors? Fine - do you want your door and its 1/3 chance or do you want the other two doors with their 2/3 chance of revealing a car? YOU DO IF YOU WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR ODDS.
...Fry
What's that? But the host opened one of those other two doors and revealed a goat? SO WHAT? There will always be at least one goat when two doors are involved. THE SHOWING OF A GOAT TELLS YOU NOTHING. The host is offering you the contents of BOTH doors and he's taking the unwanted goat off your hands, leaving you with a 2/3 shot at the car.
There are NEVER any 50-50 odds. Your odds are ALWAYS the odds of the one door you picked or THE COMBINED ODDS OF ALL THE OTHER DOORS.