The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brain Teaser Review

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The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brain Teaser ReviewIf you are old enough, you remember the sensation that the Rubik's Cube caused all the world over in 1980. No one is still alive that remembers the 1880 fad for the analogous two-dimensional "Fifteen Puzzle", which had fifteen numbered blocks within a four by four container and you were supposed to arrange them numerically. Mechanical puzzles can make storms like these, maybe because you can solve them over and over again, but it isn't often that word puzzles produce such fads. True, the Zebra Puzzle, a reasoning exercise consisting of fifteen seemingly unconnected statements that if regarded together the right way make a logical whole, was popular in 1962. Once you solved it, however, that was that. The Monty Hall Problem entered the public consciousness in 1990 and has been completely solved, but because the solution is so counterintuitive, it is still on the minds of many. One of those minds is that of Jason Rosenhouse, an associate professor of mathematics who has written _The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brain Teaser_ (Oxford University Press). "My original idea for this book," he writes, was that an entire first course in probability could be based on nothing more than variations of the Monty Hall problem." Indeed, some of the chapters here are full-power mathematics, with unknowns x, y, and z, summation or conditional probability symbols, and complicated equations choked with parentheses within brackets, and more. Math phobics won't get far with such stuff, but there is enough other material here, along with different explanations of the basic puzzle, that will be of interest to anyone who likes recreational mathematics in even the slightest degree.
People feel strongly that the answer the mathematicians have worked out is wrong and cannot be made right. Here is the problem: You are Monty's contestant, and he presents you with three identical doors. One hides a car, which you want, but the other two doors hide goats, neither of which you want. You pick a door, but instead of opening it, Monty opens one of the other two doors. Monty knows, of course, where the car is and where the goats are, and he only opens a door that shows you a goat; in the case where you happened to pick the door hiding the car, he chooses one of the two remaining doors randomly. So then you have one door open with a goat, and two doors unopened, including the one you picked. Monty now says he will give you a choice: you can stick to the unopened door you originally picked, or you can switch to the other unopened door. So, do you stick or switch? It is obviously a fifty-fifty chance, and like so many obvious things, it is also wrong. Rosenhouse goes on to show several ways of calculating the problem, and he is good at explaining why you are twice as likely to win if you switch. Essentially, Monty is giving you extra information when he opens that door with a goat behind it. You had a one third chance of picking the door with the car to begin with, and if you have picked that door and switch, you lose. But you also had a two thirds chance of picking a goat to begin with, and (under the conditions of the problem), if you picked a goat and switch, you can only switch to the door hiding the car.
Don't worry if the summary in this review isn't convincing. Many who first saw the problem in a _Parade_ magazine article by Marilyn vos Savant in 1990 weren't convinced, either. Rosenhouse prints some of the responses to her article, many of them from mathematicians and many of them withering in their disapproval of her correct analysis that switching is the best policy by a factor of two. He is embarrassed by the vituperative nature of some of the professional voices in opposition. If this puzzle were not puzzling enough, Rosenhouse goes through many variables of the problem and its effects in different schools of thought (including quantum dynamics), because there is a huge amount that has been written about it. Rosenhouse says he could write a second book with material he has reluctantly left out of this one, and this one covers: what if there are four doors, what if there are n doors, what if there is another player playing against you, or what if Monty opens any of the three doors randomly. It covers the history of the problem and the similar problems that went before it, and it covers the psychological causes of sticking or switching, and studies that show how people tend to stick in all the cultures so far tested. Best of all, for this reader anyway, it made the previously counterintuitive strategy of switching feel a little more sensible.
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