Earlier in the week I saw this interesting problem posted by Nassim Taleb:
Solving this problem requires calculus, and trig to even begin to understand how to approach it, but it still seemed like one that would be interesting to talk through with kids. Especially since a Monte Carlo-like approach is going to lead you down a surprising path.
So, I presented this problem to the boys this morning. It took a few minutes for them to get their arms around the problem, but they were able to understand the main ideas behind the question. That made me happy.
Here’s the introduction to the problem:
Next I asked the boys what they thought the answer to this question would be. It was fascinating to hear their reasoning. Both kids had the same guess -> the expected average distance was 1.
Now we went to the computer to see what the average was when we did a few trials. We started by doing 100 trials to estimate the average and then moved up to 10,000 trials.
Next we went to 1 million trials and found a few big surprises including this amazing average:
We wrapped up by discussing how you might get an infinite expected value by looking at the values of Tan(89), Tan(89.9), Tan(89.99), and so on. It was interesting for them to see how individual trials could have large weights, even with large numbers of trials.
Definitely a fun project to show kids, and a nice (though advanced) statistics lessonm too -> What happens when the mean you are looking for is infinite?
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