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4 Responses to “Of Goats and Porsches: A Monty Hall Paradox Simulator”
Funny, I was only discussing this with someone the other day. The way I pursuaded them that switching was better was to scale the whole thing up. If you had a million doors and you pick one, and 999,998 others are revealed to be “goats”, leaving only yours and one other, then clearly you would switch. Nice shell script though, you really must have too much time on your hands (although I did write a korn shell script to solve those tricky sudoku puzzles – OK, I admit it, I’m a geek at heart.)
We learned this in my statistics class. The rationale is that whether or not your first choice is actually a goat, Monte will always reveal another goat. If he didn’t know, you would have a 1/3 chance of getting it right. But because he does know, if you switch you now have a 1/2 chance. If you don’t switch you still have a 1/3 chance.
Andrew Fraser 
Thursday 18 January 2007 at 4:06 pm
Funny, I was only discussing this with someone the other day. The way I pursuaded them that switching was better was to scale the whole thing up. If you had a million doors and you pick one, and 999,998 others are revealed to be “goats”, leaving only yours and one other, then clearly you would switch. Nice shell script though, you really must have too much time on your hands (although I did write a korn shell script to solve those tricky sudoku puzzles – OK, I admit it, I’m a geek at heart.)
Monday 29 January 2007 at 4:51 am
We learned this in my statistics class. The rationale is that whether or not your first choice is actually a goat, Monte will always reveal another goat. If he didn’t know, you would have a 1/3 chance of getting it right. But because he does know, if you switch you now have a 1/2 chance. If you don’t switch you still have a 1/3 chance.
Tuesday 1 May 2007 at 4:09 am
I’ve got my own version:
http://urikalish.blogspot.com/2007/02/vertigo-and-lion-intuition-can-be.html
Thursday 14 August 2008 at 10:26 am
I guess every tries this when they start scripting ;-)
My version is here http://members.chello.at/stephen.joung/monte.html
Steve.