The easiest way to see this, and the solution usually given is that if you choose a door and not switch, the probability you were right is 1/3 -- there's one treasure door and 3 doors in total.

If you chose a door, then switched, you would get the treasure if the one you switched from was a dragon (ie you switched from dragon to treasure). There's two dragon doors and 3 doors in total, so this probability is 2/3.

Of course you can do it using conditional probabilities, but that would take more work than is required for this problem

Alumni Liaison

Ph.D. 2007, working on developing cool imaging technologies for digital cameras, camera phones, and video surveillance cameras.

Buyue Zhang