Robert Smith, PhD, Georgia State University Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for help with future columns. I am sure you will receive many letters on this topic from high school and college students. There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Whether you change your selection or not, the odds are the same. After the host reveals a goat, you now have a one‑in‑two chance of being correct. You blew it, and you blew it big! Since you seem to have difficulty grasping the basic principle at work here, I’ll explain. The column drew ten thousand letters, a thousand of them from PhDs, mainly in mathematics and statistics, most of whom said she was wrong. Vos Savant wrote that you should switch: the odds of the car being behind Door 2 are two in three, compared with one in three for Door 1. The columnist was Marilyn vos Savant, known at the time as “the world’s smartest woman” because of her entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest score on an intelligence test. The Monty Hall dilemma became famous in 1990 when it was presented in the “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade, a magazine inserted in the Sunday edition of hundreds of American newspapers. So they stick with their first choice out of inertia, pride, or anticipation that their regret after an unlucky switch would be more intense than their delight after a lucky one. Though there’s no harm in switching, they think, there’s no benefit either. They figure that since the car was placed behind one of the three doors at random, and Door 3 has been eliminated, there is now a fifty-fifty chance each that the car will be behind Door 1 or Door 2.
0 kommentar(er)
