RE: More Hard Problems Using Bayes' Theorem, Please

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 21:57:03 MDT

  • Next message: Damien Broderick: "toilet head dunking"

    Oops. I am so sorry. I honestly do not know how I can be so
    sloppy.

    > > For the red-majority barrel, the probability of
    > > drawing a red each time is 3/4, blue 1/4; so
    > > the odds of 3 blues, 7 reds is p1 = (1^3)*(3^7)/(4^10).
    > > For the blue-majority barrel, it's p2 = (3^3)*(1^7)/(4^10).
    > > Therefore the overall probability (conditioning
    > > on the 50-50 prior) is the average of those two
    > > probabilities. A posteriori we know that this is
    > > what happened, so the odds that it was the
    > > blue-majority barrel are
    >
    > > p2/(p1+p2) = 27/(27+2187) = 1/82
    >
    > Well, I get 27/(27+1054). Is that right?

    I meant 27/(27 + 1024). And just in case I did another typo
    just then, my calculation is

    P(A) ~ (1/4)^7 * (3/4)^3

    P(B) ~ (1/2)^7 * (1/2)^3 = 1/1024

    and the answer is P(A) divided by P(A)+P(B). No?

    Lee



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 07 2003 - 22:08:45 MDT