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Holiday - brain teaser
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Forum:
Politics
Category:
Other
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
00295415
Message ID:
00297272
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43
>Fair enough. As long as you agree that I'm right and your wrong. < s >

Well, you've got plenty of company -- I believe several hundred Mathematical PhDs also got it wrong, as well as thousands of others. Statisticians have a slight advantage, in that we are better trained in conditional probability. I tend to say that the 1/2 solution is not exactly wrong, it's just not the original problem, and some who gave that answer actually seemed to state the problem for which 1/2 is the right solution.

So a) it's a tricky problem even if you're tackling it correctly, (that is, how do the odds *change* if any door is selected and any other is shown with a goat), and
b) it's quite easy to be answering the wrong problem, in one of two ways:

1) People fixate on, for example, door 1 always being chosen and door 2 always having the goat. It can be any combination of the doors, of course, which is a different problem.
2) People treat the problem as a new one, in which there are only two doors, one with goat and one with prize, and forget the first 1/3 pick. As if a new problem just began, and of course 1/2 is the answer to that.
The Anonymous Bureaucrat,
and frankly, quite content not to be
a member of either major US political party.
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