Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Mathew Green
Not money-related, but typical of the dumb stuff that gets passed off as wisdom nowadays: On the TV show 'Num3ers' the character who is suposed to be a total mathmatical genius poses a question to his class:
"I have three doors. There is money behind one of them and a goat behind the other two. Pick a door." Two students pick two different doors, and he opens one to show that it is a goat. Then he asks to the other student if they want to exchange their door for the one neither of them picked and if doing so would make any difference in the odds of them winning. The class concensus is that it would make no difference, but the 'professor' explains that it would because when they first chose that door the odds of choosing the correct door were only one-in-three, but now that there are only two doors left the odds of picking the right door are 50-50... "so if you switch doors now, the odds are higher that your new choice will be right!"
The logic of that scene is so bad that even a gradeschool kid ought to see through it, but aparently neither the scriptwriters, not the actors, nor the "mathmatical consultant" listed in the credits at the end of the show realized that having a 50-50 chance of the money being behind the unpicked door means there is also a 50-50 chance that it's behind the door they already chose!
|
Hey Matthew you might want to check out this website
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
This is actually a pretty famous math problem it's called the Monty Hall paradox. It was originally posed by marilyn vos savant (aka the smartest person in the world) in a column and she had many famous mathematicians who wrote her and told her how stupid she is. She made them seem foolish.