## Rabbits in the Hat

The Great Whodunni, a stage magician, placed his top hat on the table.

‘In this hat are two rabbits,’ he announced. ‘Each of them is either black of white, with equal probability. I am now going to convince you, with the aid of my lovely assistant Grumpelina, that I can deduce their colours without looking inside the hat!’

He turned to his assistant, and extracted a black rabbit from her costume. ‘Please place this rabbit in the hat.’ She did.

Whodunnii now turned to the audience. ‘Before Grumpelina added the third rabbit, there were four equally likely combinations of rabbits. ‘ He wrote a list on a small blackboard:BB, BW, WB and WW. ‘Each combination is equally likely — the probability is 1/4.

But, then I added a black rabbit. So, the possibilities are BBB, BWB, BBW and BWW — again, each with probability 1/4.

‘Suppose —- I won’t do it, this is hypothetical — suppose I were to pull a rabbit from the hat. What is the probability that it is black? If the rabbits are BBB, that probability is 1. If BWB or BBW, it is 2/3. If BWW, it is 1/3. So the overall probability of pulling out a black rabbit is

$\frac{1}{4} \times 1 + \frac{1}{4} \times \frac{2}{3}+\frac{1}{4} \times \frac{2}{3}+\frac{1}{4} \times \frac{1}{3}$

which is exactly 2/3.

‘But. If there are three rabbits in a hat, of which exactly r are black and the rest white, the probability of extracting a black rabbit is r/3. Therefore, $r=2$, so there are two black rabbits in the hat.’ He reached into the hat and pulled out a black rabbit. ‘Since I added this black rabbit, the original pair must have been one black and one white!’

The Great Whodunni bowed to tumultous applause. Then, he pulled out two rabbits fwrom the hat — one pale lilac and the other shocking pink.

It seems evident that you can’t deduce the contents of a hat without finding out what’s inside. Adding the extra rabbit and then removing it again (was it the same black rabbit? Do we care?) is a clever piece of misdirection. But, why is the calculation wrong?

More later,

Nalin Pithwa