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Comment Re:It's easy (Score 1) 981

"it doesn't however influence the probability of the sex of the next child."

Except the problem doesn;t state that the son born on a Tuesday is the FIRST child. It could be the second, Actually the original prblem of "at least one of my two sons is a boy" is more like asking "I threw a coin up yesterday and also today, on at least one of the throws it landed up heads, what is the chance both of the throws landed up heads" giving the set {HH, HT, TH} of the 3 members, only one is HH so it's 1/3

Comment Re:Rubbish (Score 2, Informative) 981

""I have just tossed a 10 pence coin and it has come up heads, what is the probability that another coin toss will come up heads?""

Umm no, if you look at the original problem, "one of my 2 kinds is a boy, what's the probability both are boys" is like saying "Ive've tossed a coin twice, at least one of which was heads, what;s the probability that both were heads?" - so here the possibilities are H H / H T/ T H of which only one of the 3 is both heads so it's 1/3rd.

It's not saying, "the first guy was a boy - or in your analagy, the first coin toss was heads" - where you would be right, the chance of the second child being a boy, or the second coin toss being heads would be 50% - it's a different problem.

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