Score #1

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Door Number 1

There's this:
"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?"  [Stick with Plan A, or go to Plan B?]


Television Show: "Let's Make a Deal" circa 1960's

According to Wikipedia: 
"The problem was originally posed in a letter bySteve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975 (Selvin 1975a), (Selvin 1975b). It became famous as a question from a reader's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade magazine in 1990 (vos Savant 1990a): Vos Savant's response was that the contestant should switch to the other door (vos Savant 1990a). Under the standard assumptions, contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick to their choice have only a 1/3 chance.
Many readers of vos Savant's column refused to believe switching is beneficial despite her explanation. After the problem appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them claiming vos Savant was wrong (Tierney 1991). The problem is a paradox of the veridical type, because the correct result (you should switch doors) is so counterintuitive it can seem absurd, but is nevertheless demonstrably true. 
Here's the math:

Here's my image in movement: 
Three doors (moveable, on wheels, spun around by dancers) Other dancers manipulate the reveal of a toy car and two toy goats attached to doors labelled 1, 2 and 3. 
A very rapid series of spinning doors 1,2,3 match the above chart at a dizzying speed. 


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