| has gloss | eng: The Boy or Girl paradox surrounds a well-known set of questions in probability theory which are also known as The Two Child Problem , Mr. Smiths Children that the second question was ambiguous. Its answer could be 1/2, depending on how you found out that one child was a boy. The ambiguity, depending on the exact wording and possible assumptions, was confirmed by Bar-Hillel and Falk, , John Tierney of The New York Times , Leonard Mlodinow in Drunkards Walk. , as well as numerous online publications. One scientific study . Many people, including professors of mathematics, argued strongly for both sides with a great deal of confidence, sometimes showing disdain for those who took the opposing view. The paradox stems from whether the problem setup is similar for the two questions , and that the probability of these outcomes is absolute, not conditional. |