27 Aug 2005 - 23:39

Monty Hall in Curious Incident

A ktm reader (I'm sorry--I've forgotten who it was) mentioned that Mark Haddon has a nice illustration of the Monty Hall problem in his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

He does, and it's terrific:

update

Wow. Carolyn's search engines are fantastic.

I searched Comments & discovered that it was Greta Frohbieter who left the tip about Curious Incident.

Thanks, Greta!

update update

One of the things I like about this chart is that you can see that you are 'still in the same event' from start to finish.

The reason people think the odds change from 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 is that they see the second choice (stick or change) as a secont event, with a second set of odds.

This visual representation makes you feel that the event is ongoing. You haven't changed odds because you haven't changed events.

It's the Unbearable Seamlessness of Being.


low birth weight paradox (& Monty Hall)
Monty Hall, part 2
Monty Hall, part 3
false positives
false positives, part 2
Doug Sundseth on Monty Hall
John Kay: We are likely to get probability wrong (subscription only)
Monty Hall diagram from Curious Incident
probability question from Saxon 8/7

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Hey, I remember this chart from the book! It is a great description... beautifully clear.

-- CarolynJohnston - 28 Aug 2005

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Colin (my stepson) had a slightly different way of looking at it that I liked. He pointed out that if you switch, the only way you can lose is if your original door had a car behind it -- something that clearly had a probability of only 1/3.

-- CarolynJohnston - 28 Aug 2005

WebLogForm
Title:	Monty Hall in Curious Incident
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	AboutBooks, StatisticsTeaching
LogDate:	200508271939