Hi, I am relatively new to this site, I am not sure if this is the right place to be posting.
I am sure many of you are familiar with the following probability riddle:
"Sarah is walking along the street when she encounters a man. With the man is his son. He tells Sarah that he has only one more child at home. She is asked, 'what is the probability that my child is a girl?'"
Since Sarah does not know whether the boy is the elder or younger sibling, she needs to take four possible states into account. The father either had:
1) a boy, then a girl
2) a girl, then a boy
3) two girls
4) two boys
Since 3 is impossible (Sarah knows there is at least one boy) that leaves three options. Two of those options imply a girl, the other implies a boy. Therefore, she can conclude that her probability estimate must be that it is 66.6% likely that there is a girl at home, and 33.3% likely that there is a boy.
Compare this to George's situation.
"George is walking along the street when he encounters a man. With the man is his son. He tells George that the boy with him is his oldest son, and that he has only one more child at home. He is asked, 'What is the probability that my child at home is a girl?'"
George's probability estimate is clear: either the man had a boy then a girl, or he had two boys. Therefore, it is 50% likely that the child at home is a girl.
My problem is this: I understand probability exists in the mind. The actual answer to the question is 100% one way or the other. Still, it seems like Sarah knows more about the situation, where George, by being given more information, knows less. His estimate is as good as knowing nothing other than the fact that the man has a child which could be equally likely to be a boy or a girl.
If the reply is something like "Well, Sarah actually knows less so her estimate is less likely to be right" then that is something she could have figured out on her own, and then realized that assigning probability .5 is best anyways. That seems wrong.
I know I must be making a mistake somewhere: why does it seem like George learns less by knowing more?
Thank you for your help.
I agree that George definitely does know more information overall, since he can concentrate his probability mass more sharply over the 4 hypotheses being considered, but I'm fairly certain you're wrong when you say that Sarah's distribution is 0.33-0.33-0-0.33. I worked out the math (which I hope I did right or I'll be quite embarassed), and I get 0.25-0.25-0-0.5.
I think your analysis in terms of required message lengths is arguably wrong, because the purpose of the question is to establish the genders of the children and not the order in which they were born. That is, the answer to the question "What gender is the child at home?" can always be communicated in a single bit, and we don't care whether they were born first or second for the purposes of the puzzle. You have to send >1 bit to Sarah only if she actually cares about the order of their births (And specifically, your "1 or 2 bits, depending" result is made by assuming that we don't care about the birth order if they're boys. If we care whether the boy currently out walking is the eldest child regardless of the other child's gender we have to always send Sarah 2 bits).
Another way to look at that result is that when you simply want to ask "What is the probability of a boy or a girl at home?" you are adding up two disjoint ways-the-world-could-be for each case, and this adding operation obscures the difference between Sarah's and George's states of knowledge, leading to them both having the same distribution over that answer.
Good point. I was treating the description of Sarah's encounter with the man as a proxy for "Sarah knows one of the man's children is a boy, but not which one." That seems to be the w... (read more)