Sex of a newly added baby after drawing a boy
Question
A room holds five babies, two boys and three girls. A sixth baby, equally likely to be a boy or a girl, is brought in. One of the six babies is then chosen at random and turns out to be a boy. What is the probability that the newly added baby is a boy?
Short answer
. If the newcomer is a boy, a random pick is a boy with probability ; if a girl, . With equal priors, Bayes gives .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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