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by jncfhnb 847 days ago
> Monty isn't a contestant. Monty's action and outcome is part of the fixed description of the problem. He opens one of the doors and reveals a goat. Full stop.

Incorrect and I invite you to cite the line of the prompt that says otherwise. This is the critical missing piece of information that makes it the commonly understood “Monty hall problem” and not the improperly stated prompt that we actually have.

“Monty did this” != “Monty would have done this regardless of your previous choices”.

Unless this is stated, you just have an incomplete problem. If you don’t know the mechanics by which Monty decides to share information, it does not give you probabilistic info.

Probability questions frankly often require you to make judgements about the probable starting conditions based on information given so far. You frequently need to recognize that your current situation is the result of prior processes that are or are not defined.

1 comments

No, you're solving the wrong thing. This is a thought experiment, not a real life scenario with ambiguity.

In this thought experiment, MH will always open a door to a goat on purpose and always ask if you want to switch, because the entire point of the thought experiment is that people find the 2/3 odds if you switch unintuitive and baffling, leading to extremely long thread chains.

You're doing the equivalent of saying "why can't we wait and see if the cat meows" when talking about the Schrödinger's thought experiment. It can't because that's not the point of the exercise.

With all due respect, no. Please don’t jump in at the end of a long thread and bring it back to the beginning. We are not discussing “The Monty Hall Problem”. We are discussing the specifics of the actual original prompt with its failure to document all assumptions.