Tag: coding

Today we started with reviewing our findings of yesterday’s Monty Hall problem. We found that in our datasets switching resulted in a win more often than staying. The reasoning was the chance of winning for staying was 1/total number of choices while switching was total number of choice – 1/ total number of choices.

Next we examined a problem about marshmallows introducing us to statistics. We had scenarios where they were different colors and sizes and were tasked with finding the proportions between color/size and the total population. Finally we were asked to find the total amount of marshmallows and found real world applications of this problem, for example estimating the number of a specific animal in their environment.

For the remainder of the day we will be examining the meaning of r^2 in statistics, fitting a linear regression in python, and proving R2(y~x1) + R2(y~x2) >= R2(y~x1+x2).

Today, we were introduced to Dr. Laber, a professor at Duke and the head of Laber Labs, a research lab that researches different questions, mainly related to medicine, and uses methods like statistics and reinforcement learning to solve them.

Pictured below is an outreach project where Reinforcement Learning was used to “teach” a computer to play the Laser Cat game.

For the rest of the day, we’ll be working on simulating something called the Monty Hall Problem. Basically, there are 3 doors. Two have something you don’t want and the third has something you do want. You choose one door and another one is eliminated, leaving you to choose to either open your current door or switch to the other remaining one. What we’re doing is building a dataset to see how often you win when you switch doors and if there is a correlation between switching doors and winning.