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Fri, 19 Sep 2008
Unfolded laundry is stacking up... time for another movie. Tonight we watched 21; a movie inspired by the real-life events of a group of MIT students that used a card counting system to beat Las Vegas casinos by playing the card game blackjack. For me the best part of the movie was the exploration of the system from a purely mathematical point of view. The rest of the movie is just formulaic layers of plot, acting, romantic interest, and your typical revenge "twist" laid on top of an interesting premise. One such example of mathematics included in the movie is the discussion of a mathematical paradox which is used in a key sequence to test a prospective member of the gaming team before an invitation is made to join:
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?" The right answer is that it is advantageous to switch because you double your probability of winning from one-third to two-thirds. This is known as the Monty Hall problem (or Monty Hall paradox). From the wiki article: "... no other statistical puzzle comes so close to fooling all the people all the time". I didn't understand the solution either, so I had to look it up just now. Summary: A decent run-of-the-mill movie.
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