What's a boy to do?

salmobytes wrote:
Wolfgang wrote:
RE Obviously, the five dollars must be under one of the other two.

The way you stated this, you removed what at one time looked like
a one in three chance. But, the way you stated this, you took away
one of the three choices, and the one you took away was known
to be false.

So there are now two choices left, one of which is guaranteed
to be correct. And you have no evidence to indicate one choice
over the other.

The current 50-50 condition is unrelated to a previous condition,
when three chances were involved. And it doesn't matter how many times
to you do it (if you follow the sequence of events you specified).

If you restate the problem, and say you now remove one of three
choices, leaving two that might be false, or two choices that
contain at most one true, then it is a different problem.

Jesus, forget mathematicians. When you need answers to difficult
problems,
always ask a sliver digger (a carpenter).

I won't speak for anyone else, but when I need the answer to a
difficult question (or even what may turn out to be a not so difficult
question, for that matter) I think I'll ask someone who can at least
make his or her position on a previous question (not to mention an
explication thereof) clear.

Thanks, anyway.

Wolfgang
still, the venture was not entirely without profit.......we have at
least learned something about the origins of old expression, "to a man
with a hammer......."

you said you took a false choice away
That means the remaining choice is 50/50
no matter what.

Any previous condition is like Wolfgang:
totally irrelevant :-)

salmobytes wrote:
you said you took a false choice away

I said nothing of the sort. I said that I revealed one of the losing
tickets. This is not the same thing at all. Firstly, I took nothing
away. Secondly, there were no false choices. The only choices to be
made were the player's initial pick of what he or she hoped to be the
winner, mine to reveal one of the losers, and the player's to switch or
stand pat. Only one of those three is subject to a value judgment that
makes any sort of sense in context. The player can make the WRONG
second choice, but there can be nothing "false" about it or any of the
others.

That means the remaining choice is 50/50
no matter what.

Most people learn very early in life to get used to the fact that they
will not always understand what is said to them. Those of us who are
lucky also learn, eventually, that this is not really as much of a
problem as it first appear, because often enough we DO understand what
has been said to us.....even when those who said it clearly do not.

This is one of those instances.

You are absolutely right; you have no idea of what the correct solution
to the problem is (despite it's having been put forward here in various
guises several times), and thus your chances of correctly guessing what
to do are 50/50 since there are only two possibilities to choose from.

Unfortunately, for you (well, not JUST you......as we have seen here
over the past few days.....as well as the past few years), you guessed
the right answer to the wrong question. The question, as clearly
stated in the original exposition of the problem, concerned what you
SHOULD DO.....NOT your chances of guessing correctly what you should
do.

So, after several days, you have a fuzzy notion (at best) of what the
question was, no idea of what the correct answer is, and only a dim
(and wrong) notion of what you said above.

Here's what you should do. Whenever tempted to say something, you
should first determine whether or not you really have something to say.
Then, if you meet the first condition in the affirmative, you should
take some time to try to figure out whether there is any chance of
determining what it is you have to say. If that yields positive
results, you should then ask yourself whether it was worth the trouble
and would be worth the extra trouble of trying to phrase it in a way
that might be comprehensible and of interest to a reader. If so, then
you should do just that, as opposed to tapping on the keyboard in a
random fashion.

Any previous condition is like Wolfgang:
totally irrelevant :-)

And yet, here you are.

Wolfgang
p.s. for the benefit of anyone who might still be interested in all of
this, i believe it was Scott who stated early on in this thread that
the MH problem hinged on the fact that the exposure of a losing ticket
was not random. i agreed. on further reflection, it turns out that
this is not true. as i pointed out to Jon a bit later, as long as a
losing ticket comes up in the exposure, it doesn't make any difference
whether that ticket was chosen deliberately or at random. this
shouldn't be difficult for anyone to grasp. it's also not the
interesting part. what IS interesting.....because it is SO obvious in
retrospect.....is that turning up the WINNING ticket (whether by chance
or deliberately) doesn't make any differece either. remember, you, the
player, have been given the option of sticking with your original pick
or switching. the question is "what should you do." the exposure of
the winner simply makes the choice a no brainer.