Of Gold and Goats and Cars

I few days ago I posted about bags of gold and choices and statistics. If you have not read it go and read it now

To day I am going to post the answer.  but before I get there…

I realised today that if you are wanting to explain something complicated or counter-intuitive to another person it is not enough to barely understand the solution yourself. You have to understand the solution completely. It is not enough to just be convinced by another argument you have to own the argument (and more).

I posed the question from the other post to my family today after church and then failed to convince anyone of the solution. So instead of just letting the topic go, I posed another question (the Monty Hall problem) (the solution to that is also counter-intuitive), this one I thought I could explain. But was once again faced with a situation where I could not explain my convictions, ’cause I only sort of understood it myself.

So, rather than trying to explain it all myself, I am going to let some other guys tell you how it is:

• The post that (for me) started it all: the problem of the unfinished game (this is actually the coins in a bag puzzle)
• answer: 66.667%
• Look here for some reasonable explanations of the solution. finishing the game and  the post that convinced Marla

Another interesting article on problems that have an unintuitive solution: Monty Hall, Monty Fall, Monty Crawl and the related wiki article.

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