Saw this tweet from Nassim Taleb yesterday:
It reminded me of an old and unfortunate mistake from the 1998 Minnesota state high school math contest. Here was that question:
You go to visit a friend who has two children. However, you cannot remember the gender of either child. When you arrive at the house, one of those children answers the door. That child is a boy. What is the probability that the other child is a boy. Warning, the answer is not 1/2.
And, yes, that warning was part of the original question.
We were a little tight for time this morning, so I decided to use these two problems for a quick Family Math project. Here’s my kids taking a look at Taleb’s question:
Here’s my version of the second question (without the warning) and the thoughts my kids had thinking through it:
Although it isn’t all that difficult to understand the statement of either of these two questions, understanding why the two situations are different is sometimes no so easy. Taleb compares the question in his tweet to the famous Monty Hall problem. Another potentially good comparison – though much harder to understand mathematically – come from a recent Andrew Gelman blog post:
So, even though this was a quick little project, it still is both fun and instructive!