The "Monty Hall Paradox"



Most of us have taken at least one statistics course. The calculated results of most exercises usually jibed with expected result. The famous "Monty Hall Paradox" involving whether the contestant should switch doors after the first opened door is shown to contain a goat. Should the player stick with his original door, or change to the remaining unopened door in order to improve his chances of winning? PhDs have argued philosophy vs. mathematics over the situation. Here is an online applet that demonstrates the possibly surprising best choice. I say based on evolving conditions, the best answer is 50/50. You?

http://www.letsmakeadeal.com

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- Kirt Blattenberger
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster

It is always best choice to change your selection after the first wrong choice. This is based on mathematics and statistics.

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Sunshine Design Engineering Services

I saw one of 'The Mythbusters' shows the other night with the 3 door paradox. They decided that
changing your first choice was best. I'll go with Kirt and say 50-50. There were not enough
random samples for critical analysis. Flip an unbiased coin 10E6 times and still get 50-50.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Best regards,
/Clay

Here are 2 articles that may help analyze the problem and provides some insight
why peoples' intuition get this wrong and why the better choice is to switch choice,
if you get the first choice wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
http://saliu.com/monty-paradox.html

Enjoy the reading. If Game Theory interests you, I just finished an excellant read in
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's "The Predictioneer's Game". It is a facinating read on Game
Theory and how "predictions" can be made of people choices as Bruce book states
"Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future." They had a
show on Bruce's work 2 years ago on TV. The US Govenrment State Depatrment and
CIA has rated Bruce's prediction of world political and other events at better than 90%.
This is increadible statistics on future predictioneering.

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Sunshine Design Engineering Services

Thanks for those links, very interesting.
How the paradox is stated seems to matter as well.
Best regards,
/Clay

all this with the (possibly false) assumption that the room contents do not change after the first door has been chosen. The assumption holds, when doing a purely theoretical analysis of the situation (based on game theory/statistics) but i would be hesitant to apply the results on a tv game-show. Although a goat might be of some use here in greece now with the recession and all.

greetings to all!