Re: Are you a "Mental Gymnast"?

[Lois Patterson <skycerulean -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Here's an approach I found helpful to making the Monty
Hall problem intuitive:

Suppose there are one million doors, all but one of
which have a goat behind them, and one which has a car
behind it.

You pick a door.

The host opens 999,998 doors revealing goats. Your
initial choice and one other door remain unopened.

Wouldn't you now switch your initial choice to raise
the likelihood you get the car?

There are numerous simulations of this problem (both
the classical 3-door problem and other variants) on
the web, and they all show you do better on average by
switching. I think one could do such a simulation in
Excel using the RAND() function, but I haven't worked
out the details.

Technical writing tie-ins: What appears to be
intuitively correct may not be. How a situation is
explained affects your interpretation of it. Surface
logic is not always sufficient.

Lois Patterson 

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