Mike Croucher at Walking Randomly points out an interesting difference in operator precedence for several mathematical packages to evaluate a simple operation 2^3^4
. It is pretty much a divide between Matlab and Excel (does the later qualify as mathematical software?) on one side with result 4096 (or (2^3)^4
) and Mathematica, R and Python on the other, resulting on 2417851639229258349412352 (or 2^(3^4)
). Remember your parentheses…
Corey Chivers, aka Bayesian Biologist, uses R to help students understand the Monty Hall problem. I think a large part of the confusion to grok it stems from a convenient distraction: opening doors. The problem could be reframed as: i- you pick a door (so probability of winning the prize is 1/3) and Monty gets the other two doors (probability of winning is 2/3), ii- Monty is offering to switch all his doors for yours, so switching increases the probability of winning, iii- Monty will never open a winning door to entice the switch, so we should forget about them.
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