Timeline for Why was my probability question closed?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 20, 2021 at 13:20 | answer | added | Will Sawin | timeline score: 8 | |
| Aug 18, 2021 at 0:00 | vote | accept | Emperor Concerto | ||
| Aug 17, 2021 at 12:58 | comment | added | user44191 | I was one of the people who voted to close it; I also commented that it was not research-level, and so can offer my reasoning. As fedja has said, the question was ambiguous, and therefore difficult to answer; I think that once the ambiguity is resolved (so that the process in the question happens algorithmically), the probabilities can be calculated for each $n$ by simply applying the process. As such, I did not (and do not) see there being much chance of the question being interesting on the level of research. | |
| Aug 17, 2021 at 11:39 | comment | added | Gerald Edgar | A problem such as this may be on-topic in math.se ... However you would have to add your own attempted solution to avoid being closed there. You may ( instead of solutions) get hints, like "Can to you do the cases $n=1, n=2, n=3$?" | |
| Aug 17, 2021 at 4:09 | answer | added | fedja | timeline score: 9 | |
| Aug 17, 2021 at 3:43 | comment | added | fedja | It is not even clear to me from what you wrote whether the two chosen team members have to present just one problem each or they should go all the way until all $n$ problems are discussed taking turns, but that may be due to my poor understanding of English grammar... | |
| Aug 17, 2021 at 3:39 | comment | added | fedja | "asked one at a time to select a problem that has not already been taken". What exactly does that mean? The success or failure depends on the strategies the team members use in their choices in general. Also, there is no information on how the subsets of problems the members of different teams solved are related to each other and that influences the outcome too. The problem is not well-posed as you wrote it in the sense that the probability space is not unambiguously defined by the provided information. No wonder there was no solution offered. | |
| Aug 17, 2021 at 2:26 | history | edited | Emperor Concerto | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 16, 2021 at 21:49 | history | edited | Emperor Concerto | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 16, 2021 at 21:42 | comment | added | LSpice | It is probably reasonable to ask why a question was deleted, though more likely to be useful to ask how you can improve future questions to avoid deletion; but the editorialising at the end of your post is not likely to contribute to a useful discussion. | |
| Aug 16, 2021 at 17:14 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl Mod | Rather than how difficult a question is, a criterion for a question to be on-topic on MathOverflow is whether it is interesting for mathematicians. On the one hand, very many questions graduate students may ask are interesting for mathematicians, and on-topic on MO -- but on the other, it is possible to ask arbitrarily difficult questions which are not interesting for mathematicians. -- "Difficult = interesting" is a common misunderstanding. | |
| Aug 16, 2021 at 17:08 | history | edited | Emperor Concerto | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 16, 2021 at 17:02 | history | edited | Emperor Concerto | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 16, 2021 at 16:52 | history | asked | Emperor Concerto | CC BY-SA 4.0 |