Watch the video: Marilyn vos Savant was the only one who was able to solve this puzzle – do you understand the solution?
She was asked the following question:
Imagine they’re on a game show and they get to choose from three doors. There is a car behind one of the doors, and goats behind the other two doors.
You choose door number one.
The presenter, who knows which door the car is behind, opens one of the doors. For example, door number three, behind which there is a goat.
He asks you, wouldn’t you rather choose door number two?
Most people don’t see the point in revoking their original choice. Two doors, a 50-50 chance. Or not?
Marilyn vos Savant’s answer: “Yes, you should switch.”
The first door has a 1 in 3 chance that the car will be behind it.
According to vos Savant, the probability of getting the second door is 2 in 3.
How can that be?
If you think about the problem further, with many more doors, it becomes clear why the former most intelligent woman in the world came to this conclusion.
Let’s say we have 100 doors. And choose one.
Then the presenter eliminates 98 doors because he knows there is no car behind them. Only one more remains. Shall we switch now? Absolutely, because at first we only had a probability of 1 in 100. The probability that the car would be hidden behind one of the other doors, however, was 99 in 100. Now the moderator has 98 doors, behind which, as far as he knows, there are goats are removed from the game. This means that the one door he left behind now has a probability of 99 out of 100. An unbeatable advantage. The problem is named after the presenter Monty Hall, who hosted a famous game show on US TV.