User:Martin Hogbin/Notice

Error in Morgan paper confirmed
Some editors here may remember the discussion on the arguments page in which I claimed that there was an error in the Morgan paper regarding probability of winning by switching given a noninformative prior distribution of q.  That is to say that on the assumption that prior to a door being opened by the host the parameter q has a uniform distribution from 0 to 1. At the bottom of the first column on page 286 of their paper, Morgan give an answer of ln(2) which is about 0.693 whereas I claimed that the correct answer was 2/3. I calculated the correct probability of 2/3 for any distribution of q that was symmetrical about 1/2. Nijdam confirmed and completed my calculation and pointed out that the answer was 2/3 for any distribution of q that has an expectation value of 1/2. Glopk confirmed Nijdam's calculation.

Nijdam and I decided that we should write to 'The American Statistician' with this result and did so. After a long period of peer review, our letter has been published in the May 2010 issue as a letter to the editor, see. This confirms that Morgan did indeed make an error in their calculation, in fact they have thanked us for correcting their mistake. It is interesting to note that the error was due to failing to 'use the information in the number of the door shown'.

I am not sure if there has been a case before where a discussion in Wikipedia has lead to a publication in a peer reviewed journal correcting a previous paper. Martin Hogbin (talk) 17:26, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Earlier discussion
is at Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2010 (UTC)