Three prisoners are informed by their jailer that one of them has been chosen at random to be executed, and the other two are to be freed. Prisoner A asks the jailer to tell him privately which of his fellow prisoners will be set free, claiming that there would be no harm in divulging this information, since he already knows that at least one will go free. The jailer refuses to answer this question, pointing out that if A knew which of his fellows were to be set free, then his own probability of being executed would rise from 1/3 to 1/2, since he would then be one of two prisoners. What do you think of the jailer’s reasoning?
Compound Probability
Compound probability can be defined as the probability of the two events which are independent. It can be defined as the multiplication of the probability of two events that are not dependent.
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Probability theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with the subject of probability. Although there are many different concepts of probability, probability theory expresses the definition mathematically through a series of axioms. Usually, these axioms express probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure with values ranging from 0 to 1 to a set of outcomes known as the sample space. An event is a subset of these outcomes that is described.
Conditional Probability
By definition, the term probability is expressed as a part of mathematics where the chance of an event that may either occur or not is evaluated and expressed in numerical terms. The range of the value within which probability can be expressed is between 0 and 1. The higher the chance of an event occurring, the closer is its value to be 1. If the probability of an event is 1, it means that the event will happen under all considered circumstances. Similarly, if the probability is exactly 0, then no matter the situation, the event will never occur.
Three prisoners are informed by their jailer that one of them has been chosen at random to be executed, and the other two are to be freed. Prisoner A asks the jailer to tell him privately which of his fellow prisoners will be set free, claiming that there would be no harm in divulging this information, since he already knows that at least one will go free. The jailer refuses to answer this question, pointing out that if A knew which of his fellows were to be set free, then his own probability of being executed would rise from 1/3
to 1/2, since he would then be one of two prisoners. What do you think of the jailer’s reasoning?
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