Remember the age old game show, "Let's Make A Deal," with Monty Hall and Carol Merrill? Well, a couple of months ago, we posed a little puzzler inspired by said game show. The puzzler involved switching boxes and changing the odds of winning the big prize. And boy, did it cause an uproar! We practically started World War III. The puzzler itself was pretty straightforward. When we gave our answer that switching would increase your odds of winning big, all Hell broke loose. We got satchels full of mailmuch of it on letterhead from prestigious universities, with inscriptions like, "The Josiah Wadsworth Endowed Professorship of Statistical Phenomenology, Department of Applied Mathematics, Somewhat Prestigious University." Many of the letters were vituperative... and some were even downright nasty. We got mail that told us we were wrong headed, mail that told us in exactly which wrong place our heads must be, and mail telling us where we could put our heads, provided they weren't there already. Well, now we're here to prove that we're right. Why go through all this trouble? Because what could be more fun than proving a bunch of pompous academics wrong!! | |
|