I am feeling slightly wearied, cynical and utterly futile. These are times when you look at everything you have done and you feel like trashing them - I considered deleting the blog but decided against it because I couldn't figure out how to save it in case I have a change of mind later on. In any case, I figured that deleting the blog would just further decimate readership, which won't do at all.

I get this feeling halfway through games - it comes when the gameplay loses its novelty, and when you have stared at the screen for too long, when you roughly know what is coming up, but you aren't exactly looking forward to it and its too much of a hassle to find out. I always quit games like these, consequence being that I have never actually finished a game before - I usually lose interest or it gets too damn difficult before I do.


I'm hoping life gets nowhere near as difficult as games.

Will be leaving for HK in less than twelve hours time.

Hoping for my own sake that this would turn out to be the memorable thing I always wanted to do all summer.

Some thoughts on trying to resolve yesterday's problems intuitively, without having to resort to Bayes' theorem, which takes the fun out of everything.

The original Monty Hall seems less counter-intuitive this way : Because the host has to open an empty door after your initial choice, switching doors will always give you the contrary result (try a tree diagram it helps). Since there is a 2/3 chance of getting it wrong the first time, switching gives you a 2/3 chance of getting it right. You are betting against your first choice, really.

The three-card swindle seems much easier to resolve intuitively, without knowledge of conditional probability. If you open a black card (or red) and bet that the other card is black (or red) as well, you are essentially betting that the two cards are suited. That happens 2/3 of the time (because there are two suited pairs, as opposed to a mixed one).

I just watched 21 and there was brief mention of the Monty Hall problem.

Ben's answer to the reverse psychology question was inadequate - if the gameshow host is capable of trying to psyche contestants out of the right choice, it would appear that statistics do not 'back him up'. In fact, assuming that it is in the interest of the host to try prevent the contestant from winning, and if he does not have to open an empty door regardless of the contestant's choice (reverse psychology seems to be an irrelevant issue if he has to, since his choices would be effectively determined by the contestant's choice), then switching would always result in the wrong door.

It would be interesting to consider the possibility of the host accidentally opening an empty door, i.e, he has no prior knowledge of what is behind each door.At the moment, I am veering towards thinking that it is even chance before the host opens the door because the 1/3 probability that the host would open the door containing the prize would correct for the additional 33% but it would be essentially the same (i.e 66%) once the empty door is open, regardless of the host's knowledge.


The answer suggested is that, in this case, it does not matter if he switches because it is an even chance but that seems slightly counter-intuitive. I haven't gotten down to working in on paper yet. Thoughts, anyone?

I finally realised that I could watch Batman Begins on youtube and it suddenly starts to take a fucking age to load the clips. Bloody hell.