Bayes' Theorem with Lego

http://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/bayes-theorem-with-lego

by CountBayesie • 11 years ago

140 17 11 years ago

johnloeber• 11 years ago

That's quite nice; well done. The Lego definitely helps communicate intuition. I also like how you're very thorough in the computations -- it makes a good introduction.

noelwelsh• 11 years ago

Great article, but really it's the pun in the name that made it for me. Good job, Count.

CountBayesie2• 11 years ago

I'm a lover of awful puns, and was actually surprised how few people I knew got it! I'm very glad you appreciate it, thanks!

octatoan• 11 years ago

Jazz and math. Ah. What more could one ask for?

gadders• 11 years ago

Agreed. I just came here to complement the URL.

jessaustin• 11 years ago

I think this:

Great, we have arrived at the conditional probability of red given yellow!

...should have "red" and "yellow" switched. It's kind of confusing otherwise.

CountBayesie2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the catch! It should be corrected now

ibebrett2• 11 years ago

I think it should be pointed out that bayesian's believe bayes theorem as a statement about plausibility of statements, so intuitions about an event space (which are obvious statements about sets) don't carry over to the general case.

rndn• 11 years ago

Do you (or someone else) happen to know of a good introduction into Bayesian's intuition about the plausibility of statements?

pdkl95• 11 years ago

http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/03/11/frequentism-and-bay...

This a very good 4 part series on the subject, with a focus (esp. in part 3) on how this affects scientific statements.

tmoertel• 11 years ago

The best reference is Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. The first three chapters are online for free and explain the development of probability theory as a logic for plausible reasoning [1]. If you want to get a quick taste, I wrote a short blog post that introduces the theory while working through an interesting coin-toss problem [2].

[1] http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf

[2] http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2010-12-20-more-on-the-evidenc...

beloch• 11 years ago

Reading this makes me wish my math profs had played with lego during class.

balazsdavid987• 11 years ago

Great work! Recently I've been contemplating the idea of starting a blog that explains math concepts using LEGO bricks, this post gave me faith that there will be some interest in such a thing!

ygra• 11 years ago

Dear people who write math: Don't write text as-is in math mode. Either use \mathrm/\mathit (for LaTeX) or "" (for Word) to prevent random text being interpreted (and typeset as) variables adjacent to each other. The spacing for $numberOfYellowPegs$ is particularly horrifying.

JadeNB• 11 years ago

use \mathrm/\mathit (for LaTeX)

Even better, use `\text`, which re-sizes properly.

tragomaskhalos• 11 years ago

I often break out the lego when helping the kids with their maths homework - it really helps with visualisations and spatial reasoning.

Bayes' Theorem with Lego

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