An Apology: I was going to give the full solution here, but will now give my readers another chance to solve this themselves. A complete answer will be posted in Part Three.

“Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say number 1, and Monty Hall, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say number 3, which has a goat. Monty Hall then says to you, “Do you want to pick door number 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?”

To understand the answer you must ditch your emotional attachment to your first choice. When you pick a door, you have a 1 in 3 chance of being correct. So you COULD have picked the star prize. However this is just luck. The dilemma is, would switching doors INCREASE your chance of winning, or doesn’t it make any difference?

If you don’t accept this solution, you are in august company. Mathematical professors argued over this problem for ages, but it is now accepted that YOU MUST SWITCH doors, to DOUBLE your chance of winning!

Ignorance is a part of life and a central aspect of this problem. When you first pick a door you are completely ignorant of where the star prize is, so the odds are 1/3 for each of the doors. However when Monty Hall opens a door to show you a goat, he has told you something he had known but you hadn’t. You lost a lot of ignorance at that point. The statistics had changed, and your thoughts must follow the change.

Keep those brains ticking over :O)

John McNally