On 24/03/2015 19:10, Scott Huddleston wrote:
Last week's car talk puzzler http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzlers has an interesting pseudo-probabilty twist. The puzzle (3/14/15, President's Day):
My friend, Max says to me, "I just read that three of the first five presidents of the United States died, ready for this? On the Fourth of July. What do you think the odds of that happening are?" I reply, "No idea. But, I'll give you 10-to-one odds that I can name at least one of the three."
Now I don't know anything about the first five presidents, he writes, except that their names are: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. In that order.
(The actual puzzle is: given that "I" don't know anything more than that, how can "I" be so confident of identifying one of the three presidents correctly?) There is an exactly isomorphic puzzle in Martin Gardner's book "Puzzles from other worlds", collected from a column he ran in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. -- g