The Monty Hall Problem

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Objectives

Developing the Programming and Development and Algorithm learning strands, specifically:

  • Understand the difference between, and appropriately use if statements when checking doors in your simulation.
  • Use variables and relational operators within a loop to govern the end of your Monty Hall Problem game.
  • Designs solutions (algorithms) that use repetition and two-way selection i.e. if, then and else.

Introduction: The Monty Hall problem

Document It

  • Watch the video.
  • Talk with the person next to you about the following questions:
  • What is the problem?
  • Should you swap, stick with your choice or does it make no difference?
  • What is the correct choice? Can you explain why?

Learn It: The Monty Hall Problem

  • The Monty Hall Problem is probability puzzle based on an American TV game show "Let's Make a Deal" and is named after its host, Monty Hall.
  • The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975.
  • The problem was as follows:
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 No. 1,
and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, 
which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" 
Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
  • Do you think you should switch your choice or stick with your 1st choice?
  • You and most people think they should stick.
  • But as the video above video shows contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick to their initial choice have only a 1/3 chance.
  • Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced this was true until he was shown a computer simulation demonstrating the predicted result.

montyHallVisual.png

  • The image shows the three initial configurations of the game. In two of them, the player wins by switching away from the choice made before a door was opened.

Code It - List Popping

  • Using Python we're going to make our own Monty Hall Problem game.
  • First of all we need to learn a new command when using lists, .pop().
  • Pop is used with lists to "pop off" or delete the last item in a list.
  • Example code for popping a list can be seen in the Trinket below:
  • Experiment with the code above to change the list and add new items to it.
  • Try using .pop(3) this will delete the 3rd element of the list.

Code It - The Monty Hall Problem Simulation

  • Now it's time to do our own simulation of the Monty Hall Problem, to prove that you should always switch your choice.
  • Your going to complete some code so that you can simulate 10000 games of the problem at a time.
  • You'll then see the probability of the two choices of switching and staying.
  • Use the below Trinket and tasks to help you complete the badges for this week.

Badge It: Silver

  • Using the Trinket above as a starting point and using the comments to guide you, make a simulation of the Monty Hall Problem in python.
  • It should end up around 2/3 winning with switching and 1/3 with staying.
  • Screenshot your complete code for the Silver badge.

Badge It: Gold

  • For Gold you are going to comment on a version of the game where you play a round of the game like a player would in real life.
  • Modify the code below to add a comment to each line, using a #, indicating what is happenning on that line.
  • For example, for door = [1,2,3] you could add # A list called door is created containing the integers 1,2 and 3.

Badge It: Platinum

  • Using the code given to you in the Gold badge add print commands to show a visual version of your doors at each stage of the game.
  • Use google to research ASCII art to see how you can use characters to make simple graphics.
  • An example output is shown below:

ASCII_Art.png

Validate