

Being a mathematician is cool again (at least for a couple of weeks). - getp
http://weblog.fortnow.com/2008/04/life-of-party.html

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dnaquin
I was impressed that the movie used the Monty Hall problem. It's simple enough
to get the point across quickly and easily. But challenges common sense.

Of course, any class of MIT seniors learning this is a huge disappointment.

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geebee
It challenges common sense, but I'm surprised it confused so many people. When
I first heard it, I was sceptical enough that I wrote a program to simulate
it. But once it was built, there was essentially no reason to run it. Once you
break the possible outcome into all the cases, it's clear what the success
ratio will be just from looking at the algorithm.

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dnaquin
The reasons it works out are subtle: (a) the host must know what's behind the
doors, (b)the host must always open a door to a goat.

Most people fail to keep into account one of those assumptions. In fact most
tellings of the problem fail to specify and just implicitly assume one. This
leads to most confusion.

I think the telling in the movie was pretty clear though.

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dfranke
The assumption that generally fails to get communicated is that the host will
always give you an option to switch. You can only do proper statistical
analysis of the situation if know what the host will do under any given set of
conditions. Otherwise you have to consider the possibility that you'll have
the option of switching iff your first choice was the correct one -- in which
case you obviously should never switch.

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dnaquin
Right. I missed one.

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arthurk
This reminds me of Numbers, where they just throw some crazy looking math
stuff on a chalkboard but never really explain it. I hope the movie is better
than that!

