/sci/ - Science & Math

[noko No.5835756]

If you were in a room with 100 identical boxes.

99 containing £/$/€ 1 million (or your equivalent) and one that will kill you if opened.

How many, if any, would you open?

I'm sure people will make creative loop holes to get around the death situation and a lot of people will wanna know the means of death so I will try and stipulate some extra conditions and information:

>You cannot use a proxy to open or move boxes e.g animals or outsourcing.
>No x ray machines or means of looking inside beforehand.
>If a box is touched it must be opened.
>You will be killed by severe electric shock. It will be extremely painful and will take around a minute for you to die.

[Anonymous No.5835761]

>>5835756
>Simple answer
Exactly 51 boxes. Because then my odds of getting shocked are higher than of winning, and they increase if I keep opening boxes.

$51 Million would not be bad at all

[Anonymous No.5835764]

>>5835756
0

[Anonymous No.5835769]

well considering during my service in iraq for 2 years the odds of being killed were about 1 in 100, and I was paid a fraction of this, I guess I have to open at least one box.

[Anonymous No.5835768]

>a box is touched it must be opened
>one that will kill you if opened.

touch all of them before opening any, so i can't be killed because i yet have boxes to open. and there's like 100! permutations, so picking out the wrong box as the last one is pretty much impossible.

[Paranoid Tom No.5835785]

would probably try a maximum of 5
but i never have any luck, ( luck doesnt exist ) and expect to get died the moment i pick the first one

[Anonymous No.5835792]

>>5835761

>Exactly 51 boxes. Because then my odds of getting shocked are higher than of winning.

There is no simple way of making this a true statement.

If you open 51 all at once, the odds are slightly against your survival. If you open them one at a time, the odds for your survival will continue to be in your favor until there are only two boxes left (assuming you never picked the death box one of the other previous times).

[Anonymous No.5835796]

20 since with 18 million I can buy 30 houses for around $600,000 each and put them all up for rent at $500-550 a week. For each house that's $26,000 a year so I'd be making $780,000 tax free every year.
With the other two million dollars I would buy a mansion and live there as a hermit for the rest of my life.

[Anonymous No.5835800]

none. because if i was the guy designing this game, i would have the first box you opened be the one that shocks you.

[Anonymous No.5835803]

>>5835756
1% chance of death is too risky for me! I'd open none of them.

[Anonymous No.5835817]

>>5835756
My happiness would increase by 1 unit every time I double my money, defining $1mil = 0 happiness we get Hap($) = lb($)
Probability to get killed = k/100 with k the number opened

I will thus get lb(k) happiness when taking a risk of r = k/100, risk makes me unhappy, the amount of unhappiness is a(-1/(r-1)-1), meaning 0 for 0 risk, and infinity for a risk of 1, with a a constant, we determine it by noting that a risk of 50% = the happiness of all the money (lb(99)):

a = lb(99)

I will do it when my happiness is larger than my unhappiness:

lb(k) > lb(99)(-1/(k/100-1)-1)

solving for k we get 45 as the maximum number, thus I will open 45.

[Anonymous No.5835820]

Really depends on how much you are worth. Say your job pays $40 a hour, assuming you are awake 16 hours a day then $1 million translates into 4.28 years of your freetime. Given you have maybe an expected 65 years left of life, $1 million would normally cost you 4.28/65= 6.5% of your life.

So a risky 1% trade off is statistically a better deal than a guaranteed 6.5% trade off.

[Anonymous No.5835822]

>>5835820
work is not wasted time

[Anonymous No.5835821]

>>5835817
Actually happiness from receiving money halves every time you receive the same amount. For example, I give you a dollar and you get a bit happy, I give you another dollar later and you get 0.5 times as happy.

[Anonymous No.5835825]

if we consider death to be a disaster of infinite worth then I wouldn't open any of the boxes.

However if we consider death to merely mean loss of potential earnings then I would open all the boxes at once since I'd never be able to earn that much moeny and as a rational agent I should seek to be profit-maximising.

this isn't a right-wrong puzzle thing

[Anonymous No.5835827]

>>5835817
your happiness curve is way too steep, need to tone it down so the result is less boxes opened

[Anonymous No.5835828]

>>5835817
Actually it'd be (k+1)/100

[Anonymous No.5835832]

>>5835821
>opinions.

[Anonymous No.5835833]

I don't know, like five
I would be happy with $5m

[Anonymous No.5835830]

>>5835817

>Probability to get killed = k/100 with k the number opened

This is not how probability works. When there are only two boxes left, the odds of dying with the next box chosen are 50%, not 99%. The correct way to express the probability of being killed is:
1/u, where u is the number of unopened boxes remaining.

[Anonymous No.5835836]

>>5835821
the tenth dolar gives me pretty much no happiness anymore

[Anonymous No.5835837]

>>5835828
Oh, and I'm wrong. What the guy below me said.

[Crane No.5835840]

>>5835821

How the fuck do you quantify happiness like that? What's your source?

[Anonymous No.5835845]

>>5835827
I like money.

[Anonymous No.5835843]

>>5835828
in that case if I open 99 boxes, i will die with probability 1, but there is still one unopened box.

>>5835830
no, i decide at the beginning im opening k, if one of them kills me its over, so its k/100, this calculates how much to open, not when i should not open another one.

[Anonymous No.5835846]

>>5835796
don't be a fucking noob.. you have to pay property taxes, maintenance, insurance, etc.

[Anonymous No.5835847]

>>5835825
>I would open all the boxes at once
so you would kill yourself?

[Anonymous No.5835851]

Happiness is linear, 1 million gives 1 happiness, 2 gives 2, 3 gives 3...

[Anonymous No.5835871]

>>5835843

>no, i decide at the beginning im opening k, if one of them kills me its over

But this compounds your risk. Why would you do that? The rules do not demand that you open all at once.

[Anonymous No.5835876]

>>5835756
I'd open 17 boxes because 17 is my favorite number- I was 17 when I lost my virginity. It's kind of a lucky number for me.

[Anonymous No.5835887]

I'd pay one of those companies that freeze your body waiting for resurrection in the future.

Then I'd open all the fucking boxes.

[Anonymous No.5835926]

>>5835840
life, general surveys, observation.

Would you suck a dick if I gave you you 1 billion dollars? How about if you had 1 trillion and I asked the same.

[Anonymous No.5835929]

Well my equivalent is pretty much 1/3,5 of a dollar so to be confident I can live off it without fucking up, I'd open up 10 to 20 boxes. You got to remember money doesn't have a linear utility to a person, and for me a few millions would be just enough. Your scenario sounds like a dream come true, OP. To be honest I'd play a classic russian roulette for one million $, too.

>>5835840
That's called "utility", it's a concept of how giving 100 000 bucks to a poorfag from 3rd world will make him a happier and improve his life more than giving 100 000 bucks (or 10 million for that matter) to Bill Gates. Another example: Assume your assets are 2 million dollars and someone offers you a gamble of betting it. Probability of winning is 0,001 and you can win 4 billion dollars. Clearly expected value is positive, but nearly no one with 2 million of assets will go for it since they'd be almost certainly throwing their life savings away for a very slim chance of becoming a billionaire.

[Anonymous No.5835935]

>>5835871
there is no difference. opening 1 with a risk of 1/100, then another with 1/99, and so on until 1/(100-k) gives a total risk of k/100.

[Anonymous No.5835973]

>>5835756

I will definitely open as much as I can, until I hit 90% chance of death.

I am too lazy to do the math, but I am sure I can open up to 93 boxes and get away with it, because math lol.

I open 1, I live with 99% chance
I open 2, I live with 98%
3=97

I will continue until I hit 98, so I am prob going to stop at 93-96.

[Anonymous No.5835994]

>>5835792
Assuming you have decided ahead of time to open 51 boxes, there is no significant difference between opening them all at once and opening them one at a time.

[Anonymous No.5835996]

>>5835822
Yes it is. Keep deluding yourself and living a shitty life for the system.

[Anonymous No.5836000]

>>5835926
>Would you suck a dick if I gave you you 1 billion dollars? How about if you had 1 trillion and I asked the same.
Yes and yes. What's your point?

[Anonymous No.5836008]

I think that after 25 boxes each next box will mean less then the previous, so it's not really worth it.

I'd stop at around 30.

[Anonymous No.5836016]

>>5835935
>there is no difference. opening 1 with a risk of 1/100, then another with 1/99, and so on until 1/(100-k) gives a total risk of k/100.

There is a difference, because if you open one and don't die, you are in the universe where the last one didn't kill you and have to adjust probability to account for this.

[Anonymous No.5836017]

>>5835756
>y happiness
I would use my shirt to open the boxes.

[Anonymous No.5836018]

>>5836000
Then you act differently for 99% of people so when people say "generally this is how people act", you shouldn't get mad when it doesn't relate to you.

[Anonymous No.5836019]

>Severe electric shock
>Painful

I will open all the fucking boxes, no matter what. If the electric shock is so severe, it will fuck my brain, burn all the nociceptors in nervous system, burn the muscles and i would become nothing but a bunch of lipids, proteins and carbohydrates just about i touch the shit. After the shock i won't feel anything, so why should i give a fuck about death?

[Anonymous No.5836026]

I would get a drug addict to open them for me.

[Anonymous No.5836027]

>>5836016
>multiple world interpretation
>>>/x/

[Anonymous No.5836046]

>>5836016
>you are taking unnecessary risk by doing that, if you have a 1% chance to die at every round due to the 100 boxes being replenished when you open one, you would every time open one more to infinity since you always have a very small chance to die at one particular one, but the chances to get 100 or 200 in a row without death is very slim.

[Anonymous No.5836049]

>>5836019

[Anonymous No.5836061]

>>5836027
You flip a coin and you get heads
>multiple world interpretation
>>>/x/

>>5836046
that is assuming that you get the same utility from earning 1million dollars at all wealth levels which unless you are >>5836000, it probably isn't true.

[Anonymous No.5836099]

One

[Anonymous No.5836103]

>>5835756
Quantum immortality.
One of my multiverse bros will win the big prize.

[Anonymous No.5836107]

I call a wizard to ask nicely each box if Death is sitting inside.

[Anonymous No.5836146]

>>5835843
>if I open 99 boxes I will die with probability 1

My thing was wrong for a different reason, but if you opened 99 boxes without dying, the chances of you dying on the next one you open is 100%. That's what was intended. The equation (not mine, but the 1/u one)the probability of dying on whatever box you open, not the number of boxes you have opened.

[Anonymous No.5836865]

>>5835756