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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:Simulation of the game (Score: 4, Interesting) by jdavidb on Friday July 29 2016, @12:59PM

  by jdavidb (5690) on Friday July 29 2016, @12:59PM (#381507) Homepage Journal

  This takes me back. In the 1980s somehow my dad and I became enamored of this problem. We spent a long time trying to work it out and Dad even called one of his old college professors for some assistance in understanding it. Then a buddy of dad's from work gave us a program in Applesoft Basic that ran and counted many trials of the problem to demonstrate the true odds, which I proceeded to painstakingly key in to my Apple II Gs. I don't think I believed anything we heard about the problem until I saw the simulation run with my own eyes. That was also probably one of my earliest experiences seeing how programs could be used to model a situation.

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