Monty Hall problem

Steve Selvin introduced a probability puzzle in a letter to The American Statistician on February 1, 1975. He based the scenario on the game show Let's Make a Deal, where a contestant picks one of three doors. The host then opens a different door to reveal a goat and offers the player a chance to switch their choice. Selvin named this specific setup the "Monty Hall problem" in a follow-up letter published later that year.

The solution defies common intuition because switching doors doubles the odds of winning the car from one-third to two-thirds. This counterintuitive result gained massive attention in September 1990 when Marilyn vos Savant explained it in her Parade magazine column. Her explanation sparked a backlash involving thousands of letters from readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs who insisted she was wrong. [edit]