Monty Hall

So I just got a book called Einstein's Riddle by Jeremy Stangroom. It is filled with paradoxes, riddles and such. I attempted the actual Einstein's Riddle, though I must admit that I failed to come up with the correct problem. Then I came across my favorite probability problem of all time: The Monty Hall Problem.

It goes like this: You are a contestant on a gameshow with three doors to choose from. Behind one door is a Ferrari, but behind the other two are goats. So you pick your door, it doesn't matter which. Since Monty knows which item is behind what door, he then opens one of the other doors to reveal a goat. He then gives you the option of switching your choice the remaining unopened door. Should you?

I recall first hearing about this problem in the movie 21, about the MIT kids who go to Las Vegas to make money card counting. The explanation they gave made no sense to me, but luckily, this book's explanation did. If you don't know/can't figure out the answer, then you should go look it up. Trust me, it isn't what you think.

Well hello there!

I guess I should do some type of introduction, as this is my first post, but really I don't like introductions, so I'm going to make it short and simple.

I am a teenager who has recently come to discover the extreme complexity behind the human mind and beliefs that it holds. I simply want to try my best to understand what is going on around me, and somehow make people understand what I'm thinking (which can be quite a challenge, trust me). This blog will mostly be my random philosophies that are thought up while reading a book, watching a movie, listening to music, etc. I may even throw some personal stuff in there, because isn't that what a blog is for?

I will always try to keep the books I'm reading and movies I'm watching updated over at the right, so you can try your best to understand what I'm thinking and what sparked my revelations.

So yesterday, a friend and I were being our normal nerdy selves (yes, I am quite a geek at times), and noticed that you are able to perform factorials of only whole numbers and their halves, which at first was interesting in itself, but then we discovered how to calculate the half factorials. We discovered that they are very similar to their whole number counterparts, except for the fact that they are then multiplied by the square root of pi. For example, 5!=5x4x3x2x1, but 5.5!=5.5x4.5x3.5x2.5x1.5x.5x(square root of pi). I looked the reason for this up on Wikipedia, but it has something to do with something called the Gamma function, which is basically Morse code to a deaf person for me. If anyone could help, that would be great!