Roger Craig won a quarter of a million dollars on the TV game show Jeopardy! this year, setting the all-time record for money won in a single game. Here's how he did it: The Computer scientist decided to focus his study on the most common topics that come up during a game. He downloaded an online database of all the past questions and then created a pattern recognition program to look for the types of questions that were most likely to come up again - and then studied accordingly. World capitals are more likely to come up than questions about fashion, so he spent more time studying capitals. And instead of trying to learn every capital, he focused on the most statistically popular. He told NPR, "You can practice haphazardly or (you can study) efficiently."
The lesson here: before throwing yourself into a project haphazardly, spend some time identifying its critical parts and organizing how you will attack them to prioritize your effort.
There is a video of Craig in action here and you can hear an NPR story here.
Showing posts with label probability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label probability. Show all posts
Monday, November 28, 2011
Friday, March 19, 2010
Are Birds Smarter Than Mathematicians?”
Birds perform better on the Monty Hall dilemmal than humans, according to researchers at Whitman College. Their study is summarized in the Journal of Comparative Psychology in an article titled Are Birds Smarter Than Mathematicians?”
People do badly on the problem around the world. When it appeared in the "Ask Marilyn" column published in Parade magazine, 92% of the 10,000 letters in response disagreed with her solution.
But in the experiments, pigeons quickly reached the best strategy for the Monty Hall problem.
The researchers speculate that birds are more likely use empirical probability to solve the Monty Hall problem. In empirical probability, one makes predictions after tracking outcomes over time. Humans, on the other hand, tend to go with classical probability in which one tries to figure out every possible outcome and make predictions without collecting data. Our way of tackling probability-based problems generally work pretty well for us but the Monty Hall dilemma being one notable exception. Our dependence on visual information to quickly make sense of the world can make us more vulnerable to visual illusions.
Stephen Goforth
People do badly on the problem around the world. When it appeared in the "Ask Marilyn" column published in Parade magazine, 92% of the 10,000 letters in response disagreed with her solution.
But in the experiments, pigeons quickly reached the best strategy for the Monty Hall problem.
The researchers speculate that birds are more likely use empirical probability to solve the Monty Hall problem. In empirical probability, one makes predictions after tracking outcomes over time. Humans, on the other hand, tend to go with classical probability in which one tries to figure out every possible outcome and make predictions without collecting data. Our way of tackling probability-based problems generally work pretty well for us but the Monty Hall dilemma being one notable exception. Our dependence on visual information to quickly make sense of the world can make us more vulnerable to visual illusions.
Stephen Goforth
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