re: Let's Find Out How Smart You Baws Are

Don't feel bad, baws. Paul Erdos got it wrong. Erdos was at Princeton and had more than 1,500 published papers in topics like graph theory, analysis, number theory, set theory, and probability theory. Erdos never won a Field's medal, but did win the Wolf prize and some other awards.

One day one of his colleagues posed the Monty Hall problem to him just for fun and told Erdos that switching is best. Erdos responded "That's impossible. Switching gives no advantage."

After going back and forth for a while, the professor did a Monte Carlo simulation on a computer that proved over 100,000 trials that switching gives a 2/3rds chance of winning. Erdos accepted the results but still did not understand why it was true.

A week later he got a call from Erdos who said another one of his colleagues explained it to him and that he now understood it. Erdos explained the reasoning, but the guy did not understand Erdos' line of reasoning. He said he was just glad that Erdos was now convinced.