2021 - Vancouver - The Monty Hall Problem
I think I may have found the original 3 doors from Monty Hall's "Let's Make a Deal". The NBC television show premiered in December 1963.
Choosing the right door with the car has come to be called the Monte Hall problem.
It’s a famous paradox that has a solution that is so absurd, most people refuse to believe it’s true.
Suppose you’re on Monte’s 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 Monte, 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?
Believe it or not, it’s actually to your benefit to switch:
If you switch, you have roughly a 2/3 chance of winning the car.
If you stick to your original choice you have roughly a 1/3 chance of winning the car.
The answer sounds unlikely.
After door 3 is opened, you would think you then have two doors to choose from…both with the same odds. However, you are actually much more likely to win if you switch.
Those who switched doors won about 2/3 of the time.
Those who didn’t switch won about 1/3 of the time.
This fact has been proven over and over again with a plethora of mathematical simulations.
If you’re stumped and still don’t believe it — don’t worry, even mathematicians scratch their head on this one. One genius mathematician, Paul Erdős didn’t believe the answer was right until he was shown simulations of the winning, “switch”, strategy.
A lot of people have trouble with the better odds of switching doors, myself included, until I realized a fact: the odds are better if you switch because Monty curates the remaining choices.
Let’s say you played the game where Monty doesn’t know the location of the car. It wouldn’t make any difference if you switch or not (your odds would be 50% no matter what).
But this isn’t what happens. The Monty Hall problem has a very specific clause: Monty knows where the car is. He never chooses the door with the car. And by curating the remaining doors for you, he raises the odds that switching is always a good bet.
Steve Selvin:
The origins of the problem. The Monty Hall problem, also known as the as the Monty Hall paradox, the three doors problem, the quizmaster problem, and the problem of the car and the goats, was formalized by biostatistician Steve Selvin (1975) in a letter to the journal The American Statistician.
Monty Hall:
Monty Hall (Monte Halparin) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1921 and died in 2017 at 96 of a heart attack in his Los Angeles home.
2021 - Vancouver - The Monty Hall Problem
I think I may have found the original 3 doors from Monty Hall's "Let's Make a Deal". The NBC television show premiered in December 1963.
Choosing the right door with the car has come to be called the Monte Hall problem.
It’s a famous paradox that has a solution that is so absurd, most people refuse to believe it’s true.
Suppose you’re on Monte’s 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 Monte, 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?
Believe it or not, it’s actually to your benefit to switch:
If you switch, you have roughly a 2/3 chance of winning the car.
If you stick to your original choice you have roughly a 1/3 chance of winning the car.
The answer sounds unlikely.
After door 3 is opened, you would think you then have two doors to choose from…both with the same odds. However, you are actually much more likely to win if you switch.
Those who switched doors won about 2/3 of the time.
Those who didn’t switch won about 1/3 of the time.
This fact has been proven over and over again with a plethora of mathematical simulations.
If you’re stumped and still don’t believe it — don’t worry, even mathematicians scratch their head on this one. One genius mathematician, Paul Erdős didn’t believe the answer was right until he was shown simulations of the winning, “switch”, strategy.
A lot of people have trouble with the better odds of switching doors, myself included, until I realized a fact: the odds are better if you switch because Monty curates the remaining choices.
Let’s say you played the game where Monty doesn’t know the location of the car. It wouldn’t make any difference if you switch or not (your odds would be 50% no matter what).
But this isn’t what happens. The Monty Hall problem has a very specific clause: Monty knows where the car is. He never chooses the door with the car. And by curating the remaining doors for you, he raises the odds that switching is always a good bet.
Steve Selvin:
The origins of the problem. The Monty Hall problem, also known as the as the Monty Hall paradox, the three doors problem, the quizmaster problem, and the problem of the car and the goats, was formalized by biostatistician Steve Selvin (1975) in a letter to the journal The American Statistician.
Monty Hall:
Monty Hall (Monte Halparin) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1921 and died in 2017 at 96 of a heart attack in his Los Angeles home.