All 1 entries tagged Coupling

No other Warwick Blogs use the tag Coupling on entries | View entries tagged Coupling at Technorati | There are no images tagged Coupling on this blog

June 03, 2017

A puzzle about inference

Here is a puzzle which I often use as a starter for a course of lectures on probabilistic coupling. The puzzle arose during some research -- I devised it as a simple example to show myself why a particular idea would not work -- and I developed the solution using calculations. In a lunch queue, I asked James Norris of Cambridge whether he could think of a calculation-free answer, and he found one almost immediately.

  • You go to Starbucks with a friend.
  • You are the quiet type, and stay in the front room near the window, sipping a coffee slowly to make it last.
  • She is extrovert, and has gone through to a further room where the louder people gather.
    There she plays a game: toss n coins, win if r heads or more.
  • After the game should have finished, a third friend comes through and says,
    either: "She won the first toss'';
    or: "She won at least one toss''.
    (Why don't people speak more clearly?!)
  • Which is better news for your friend? Prove your answer without calculation!

March 2024

Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
Feb |  Today  |
            1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Search this blog

Galleries

Most recent comments

  • More recently I have noticed the following elementary fact about convergence in probability. Suppose… by Wilfrid Kendall on this entry
  • Thanks to Martin Emil Jakobsen for pointing out a typo in the example of conditioning on a single ev… by Wilfrid Kendall on this entry
  • The paper includes a nice example of application of a log–normal distribution, which is used to mode… by Wilfrid Kendall on this entry
  • See also their webapp https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/ by Wilfrid Kendall on this entry

Blog archive

Loading…
RSS2.0 Atom
Not signed in
Sign in

Powered by BlogBuilder
© MMXXIV