Boy born on tuesday problem

conditional probabilityprobability

The problem is the one talked about here. As far as I understood it, the conclusion is that if I take a large number of families of two children with one boy born on Tuesday, the empirical probability will approach $13/27$ instead of $1/3$.

But the probability of having two boys given one boy is born on an Xday is 13/27 for Xday= any day of the week. So suppose I am told that one of the child is a boy. Why can't I just assume that that boy was born on some Xday and come to the probability that both are boys to be 13/27 even though I don't know what day Xday is?

Best Answer

The problem with your proposed answer is the sentence "Why can't I just assume that that boy was born on some Xday ..." There is no "that boy," because it is possible that there are two boys.

Here is a more detailed explanation. Let $A$ be the event that both children are boys. Let $B_1$ be the event that at least one child is a boy born on a Sunday, $B_2$ the event that at least one child is a boy born on a Monday, and so on for $B_3$ through $B_7$. We have $\bigcup_{i=1}^7 B_i = B = $ the event that at least one child is a boy.

As you have observed, the reasoning for the Tuesday problem would apply to any day of the week, so $P(A \mid B_1) = P(A \mid B_2) = \cdots = P(A \mid B_7) = 13/27$. It is tempting now to reason as follows: The sets $B_1$, ..., $B_7$ are disjoint, since a child can't be born on two different days of the week. And using this disjointness, it is not hard to show that $P(A \mid B)$ is the average of $P(A \mid B_1)$ through $P(A \mid B_7)$ (just use the definition of conditional probability), so it is also 13/27. But we know that $P(A \mid B) = 1/3$, so something is wrong.

The mistake is that the sets $B_1$ through $B_7$ are not disjoint, because there could be two boys born on different days. So the argument that $P(A \mid B)$ is the average of the $P(A \mid B_i)$ doesn't work.

For more on this, see my book with Stan Wagon, Bicycle or Unicycle, problem 49.