相关论文: Stunned by Sleeping Beauty: How Prince Probability…

Let $q \in (0,1)$ and $\delta \in (0,1)$ be real numbers, and let $C$ be a coin that comes up heads with an unknown probability $p$, such that $p \neq q$. We present an algorithm that, on input $C$, $q$, and $\delta$, decides, with…

On March 16, 2024, Daniel Litt, in an X-post, proposed the following brainteaser: "Flip a fair coin 100 times. It gives a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence of flips, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does,…

Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…

A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…

The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…

Models of updating a set of priors either do not allow a decision maker to make inference about her priors (full bayesian updating or FB) or require an extreme degree of selection (maximum likelihood updating or ML). I characterize a…

In the context of the Sleeping Beauty problem, it has been argued that so-called "halfers" can avoid Dutch book arguments by adopting evidential decision theory. I introduce a Dutch book for a variant of the Sleeping Beauty problem and…

Reasoning is key to many decision making processes. It requires consolidating a set of rule-like premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions. In this work, we address both the case…

Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…

Benford's law is an empirical observation, first reported by Simon Newcomb in 1881 and then independently by Frank Benford in 1938: the first significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically…

When a thick cylindrical coin is tossed in the air and lands without bouncing on an inelastic substrate, it ends up on its face or its side. We account for the rigid body dynamics of spin and precession and calculate the probability…

Consider $n$ independent, biased coins, each with a known probability of heads. Presented with an ordering of these coins, flip (i.e., toss) each coin once, in that order, until we have observed both a *head* and a *tail*, or flipped all…

In the Cumulative Advantage(CA) model, which is one of the most fundamental approaches to understand the mechanism of citation dynamics, papers receive citations depending on how much they have been already cited. On the other hand, a…

Hallucination is often viewed as a direct consequence of missing knowledge: a model answers incorrectly when the correct answer is absent from its generation-time distribution, and correctly when it is present. We test this assumption by…

The primary objective of this note is to revisit the two envelope problem and propose a simple resolution. It is argued that the paradox arises from the ambiguity associated with the money content $x of the chosen envelope. When X=x is…

Alice holds an random variable $X$, and Bob is trying to guess its value by asking questions of the form "is $X=x$?". Alice answers truthfully and the game terminates once Bob guesses correctly. Before the game begins, Bob is allowed to…

It is often objected that the Everett interpretation of QM cannot make sense of quantum probabilities, in one or both of two ways: either it can't make sense of probability at all, or it can't explain why probability should be governed by…

Conventional and current wisdom assumes that the brain represents probability as a continuous number to many decimal places. This assumption seems implausible given finite and scarce resources in the brain. Quantization is an information…

Conditioning is the generally agreed-upon method for updating probability distributions when one learns that an event is certainly true. But it has been argued that we need other rules, in particular the rule of cross-entropy minimization,…

In October 2017 the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), Italy's body for official statistics, has published the book of fairy tales Le streghe di Bayes (The witches of Bayes) written by ISTAT staff members with the commendable…