Show HN: The Monty Hall Problem in JavaScript

Start with one million doors.

Choose one.

Now have Monty open 999,998 of them.

Do you switch doors?

I believe it works because the chooser is forced to reckon with the 1 in a million chance that they chose the correct door. Additionally, it becomes clear that Monty actually fed the chooser new information by opening 999,998 doors.

It may not take the first time, but given a few rounds of the million door challenge both truths should sink in for the chooser.

Perhaps it would help to have a Javascript version that starts with a sufficiently large number of doors the first round, then cuts that in half each round until you get down to 3. The odds of winning decrease each time but the principle should still hold. (Although I can imagine some people getting back down to three doors and suddenly reverting back to their previously held intuition...)

- The language randomly seems to switch to something else ("porta")

- Even if you're faintly familiar with the problem (like me), it's hard to gauge the actual goal of the game. For example I didn't recall if a door being empty is good or not.

- The coloring seems not very helpful. Red for the chosen door? Red is usually associated with something bad. And the colors for opened and still closed doors are not easily associated with their state. A simple bitmap or even a text would say much more than those colors.

- The statistics give a lot of numbers that aren't meaningful, and don't show the meaningful ones. In particular the absolute counts of how often was switched are hardly of importance. It's about the ratio of correct decisions - in particular that number should be split into switching and not switching decisions.

I guess the fact that it's statically better to switch is definitely a tough pill to swallow.