Why the 'Sleeping Beauty Problem' Is Keeping Mathematicians Awake
scientificamerican.comThis strikes me like the Monty Hall problem where people intuitively believe the answer to be 50/50.
Does this not simulate the problem in python?
import random
coin = ["heads", "tails"]
guess = "heads"
guesses_correct = 0
wakings = 0
n = 1_000_000
for _ in range(n):
actual = random.choice(coin)
if actual == guess:
wakings += 1
guesses_correct += 1
else:
wakings += 2
print(f"guessed correctly: {guesses_correct/wakings:0.2f}%")Not really. Unlike the monty hall problem, sleeping beauty receives no additional information. The thought experiment was originally brought up to illustrate how a perfectly rational agent’s credence in the relevance of her temporal position to some proposition can change over time even though she receives no new information nor suffers from a cognitive mishap. This point is more evident in the original paper by Elga: https://swh.princeton.edu/~adame/papers/sleeping/sleeping.pd...