It is my experience that if you tell people the answer to it within about 30 minutes of telling them the riddle, they believe you. Any longer, and it takes a lot more explanation, more and more as time passes.
Another way to explain this is to lay out all the possible things that could happen given an arrangement of things:
door 1: car
door 2: goat
door 3: goat
Then there are the following siutations where someone can pick the car:
door1->stay
door2->switch to 1
door3->switch to 1
and the following situations where someone can pick a goat:
door1->switch to 1 or 2
door2->stay
door3->stay
Notice that in the car category, 2/3 are “switch” and, only 1/3 stay.
If that isn’t convincing enough, I will try and find some external sources of explanation.
In other words before the person opens a door there is a 2/3 chance that you are wrong and a 1/3 chance that you are right
This is the same as the goat category
Have a look at this after the the person opens up a door with a goat
door 1: car
door 2: goat
door 3: goat -->has been opened
Then there are the following siutations where someone can pick the car:
door1->stay
door2->switch to 1
and the following situations where someone can pick a goat:
door1->switch to 2
door2->stay
There is a 50% chance that they will pick the car and 50% that they will pick the goat. Everyone, tell me if you agree, and perhaps you can explain it better than me.
There are others. On the websites themselves I am sure there are links, and if you want to search for yourself you might type in “monty car goats” into a search engine.
“Well, what did I think, first? I too thought that the solution was obvious, but I did not tell this to Anya. I pretended that I knew the correct answer from the beginning, of course.”
My head and tail both equal are,
My middle slender as a bee.
Whether I stand on head or heel
Is quite the same to you or me.
But if my head should be cut off,
The matter’s true, though passing strange
Directly I to nothing change.
What am I???
I understand where you have been coming from now, but…
We don’t know if this is at random or not, you should have said that the person can only choose a door that has a goat. And that he couldn’t pick the door that you are on. Say if you picked a goat and then the host showed you behind your door. You be better off changing because you know there is a goat behind your door.
I understand the problem better now and this quote from the first site you gave might help others
2/3 because 2/3 are wrong doors and 1/3 are right.
Sorry alex. The trick with this one is phrasing it just right: a little bit of mis-phrasing can cause a cascade of mis-interpretation that just destroys any possibilty of understanding the problem.
A man and his son were on a tour of an atomic power plant. In the control room, the boy asked if he could see the controls for the reactor core. The head physicist said yes, and explained how the controls worked. After the boy left, the head physicist turned to an assistant and said, “That was my son.”
How could that be?
You are stuck in an air tight room. You only have 15 minutes worth of oxygen left. There are no windows, there are only two doors. And in this room there are 2 computers, one is programed to tell nothing but the truth. The other is programed to tell nothin but lies. You can ask ONE question to ONE of the computers. If you touch the wrong door both of them disappear and your stuck.
A snail fell down a hole.It is 30cm deep, and the snail trys to escape as fast as possible.It goes up 13cm every day, but the following night it always has to sleep (and dream g) and slides down 7cm.
How many days does it take the snail to get out?
A 12x30 foot room has a 12 foot ceiling. In the middle of the end wall, a foot above the floor, is a spider. The spider wants to capture a fly in the middle of the opposite wall, one foot below the ceiling. Considering that the spider must always be crawling along the wall, what is the shortest path the spider can take?
Also:
There are three boxes labeled “Apples”, “Oranges” and “Apples and Oranges”. Each label is incorrect. You can select one fruit from one box, and you can’t feel around or peek. How can you label each box correctly?
Both of these aren’t very hard. The first one is a little bit strange. The answer is not 42 for the first one.
