Monty Hall Problem

A friend of mine got asked this question in an interview yesterday and I thought it'd make an interesting programming problem. It goes something like this ... Suppose you're on a game show and are offered the choice of one of three doors. Behind one of the doors is a car and behind the other two are goats. Let's say you choose door number three (see Jimmy Buffet song). At this point Monty Hall shows you that behind door number one is a goat and offers to let you switch to door number two. The question is, should you do it? The easy (and incorrect answer) is that it doesn't matter. The correct answer is that, yes you should. Why? I'll let you look it up or you can just run the following program ...

possible_doors = [:goat, :goat, :car].permutation.to_a
bad_choice = 0
tries = 100000
1.upto tries do |mc|
    test_doors = possible_doors[Random.rand(possible_doors.length)]
    bad_choice += 1 if test_doors[Random.rand(test_doors.length)] == :car
end
puts "bad_choice percent = #{bad_choice.to_f / tries.to_f * 100} good_choice percent = #{100.0 - (bad_choice.to_f / tries.to_f * 100)}"

First up, we get a list of all the possible ways the doors could be arranged and set the number of times that switching would be a bad choice to 0. We'll run this 100000 times in a Monte (not Monty) Carlo loop. In the loop we get one of the possible arrangements of test doors randomly selected and then increment the bad_choice variable if the door we pick contains the car (in other words switching from where we are would be a "bad choice"). When we run this program we see that switching is a bad choice only about 33% of the time and a good choice about 66% of the time (one might guess that these are really 33.333333...% and 66.6666666%). So, then answer in this case is that yes you should switch.

Let me know if you have questions or comments.