3 ms·
No, that's not the problem. You don't know how much money is in either envelope, but it needn't have been selected randomly. The only randomness is whether you
by philh 16y ago
No, that's not the problem. You don't know how much money is in either envelope, but it needn't have been selected randomly. The only randomness is whether you the envelope you choose has the greater or lesser value, which is just a uniform distribution on two points.
That being said,
>It is impossible to choose a value from an infinite series (the list of possible monies), with every value having an equal opportunity of being chosen.
this is also incorrect. You're right to say that you can't have a uniform distribution over the possible values of money, but that's not just because it's infinite. You can have a uniform distribution over [0,1] for example, which is larger than the set of possible money values.
- cdavidcash 16y ago>You don't know how much money is in either envelope, but it needn't have been selected randomly. This is exactly wrong, at least in the mathematical formalization of this problem that everyone is assuming. The definition of "don't know how much money" must be taken to be "has a uniform distribution". If you want to use some reasoning that treats the amount of money as an "unknown in an equation" then you are instead giving a solution that differs for each possible value of the money and does not capture the random choices we are trying to model. By the way, no one said that uniform distributions on infinite sets don't exist. He said "infinite series (the list of possible monies)", a slightly mis-used term that clearly excludes [0,1], your chosen example.