If Monty Hall Falls or Crawls

The Monty Hall problem is consistently misunderstood. Mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal argues in “Monty Hall, Monty Fall, Monty Crawl” and Struck By Lightning that a proportionality principle can solve and explain the Monty Hall problem and its variants like Monty Fall and Monty Crawl better than the classic solution. Rosenthal’s Monty Fall example and solution are examined in detail. I show he has misidentified the crucial assumption in the Monty Hall problem, and his own Monty Fall problem is logically equivalent to the original Monty Hall problem. I then present the Monty Fall* case where the probabilities for which door to pick post tease reveal are actually 50/50 using nothing more than Bayes’ Theorem and the standard rules of probability to prove the results—no proportionality principle is needed. The classic solution prevails as explanatorily more powerful. Finally, I show that Monty Crawl is also better explained and solved with the classic solution rather than with Rosenthal’s proportionality principle

\u3cem\u3eIke and Monty: Generals at War\u3c/em\u3e by Norman Gelb [Review]

Review of Norman Gelb, Ike and Monty: Generals at War. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1994

Financial Engineering and Rationality: Experimental Evidence Based on the Monty Hall Problem

Financial engineering often involves redefining existing financial assets to create new financial products. This paper investigates whether financial engineering can alter the environment so that irrational agents can quickly learn to be rational. The specific environment we investigate is based on the Monty Hall problem, a well-studied choice anomaly. Our results show that, by the end of the experiment, the majority of subjects understand the Monty Hall anomaly. Average valuation of the experimental asset is very close to the expected value based on the true probabilities.experiment, behavioral finance

Existentialism and Monty Python: Kafka, Camus, Nietzsche, and Sartre

This essay utilizes the work of the comedy group, Monty Python, as a means of introducing basic concepts in Existentialism, especially as it pertains to the writings of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus

Editorial: Beyond Pythagoras

This fourth journal issue of Divergence Press is a selection of papers given at the Beyond Pythagoras Symposium held at the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music, 21-23 March 2014. The symposium sought to explore new trends in the sonic arts and experimental electronic music particularly new tuning systems, post-acousmatic and post-digital aesthetics, as well as the re-embodiment of sound production and listening

Noisy quantum Monty Hall game

The influence of spontaneous emission channel and generalized Pauli channel on quantum Monty Hall Game is analysed. The scheme of Flittney and Abbott is reformulated using the formalism of density matrices. Optimal classical strategies for given quantum strategies are found. The whole presented scheme illustrates how quantum noise may change the odds of a zero-sum game.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Does Logic Help Us Beat Monty Hall?

The classical Monty Hall problem entails that a hypothetical game show contestant be presented three doors and told that behind one door is a car and behind the other two are far less appealing prizes, like goats. The contestant then picks a door, and the host (Monty) is to open a different door which contains one of the bad prizes. At this point in the game, the contestant is given the option of keeping the door she chose or changing her selection to the remaining door (since one has already been opened by Monty), after which Monty opens the chosen door and the contestant wins the prize which lies behind it. Inspired by the work of Morrow, Oman and Salminen (2016, “Game Show Shenanigans: Monty Hall Meets Mathematical Logic,” Elemente der Mathematik 71(4), pp. 145-155), we consider several logic-themed variants of this problem. Among these are versions where d doors and p prizes reside behind some p of these doors, and the contestant is permitted to present Monty with q random true/false questions concerning the location of the prizes, to which Monty must respond truthfully. Our results extend those of the original paper, and involve a combination of probabilistic techniques and exhaustive computation using a computer program