Numerical answer
A fair die is rolled once. If it shows 1 or 2, two balls are drawn without replacement from urn containing 2 white and 3 black balls; otherwise two balls are drawn without replacement from urn containing 3 white and 2 black balls. Given that both balls drawn are white, let be the probability that urn was used. Find .
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Answer: 7
Use Bayes' theorem. The prior for is and for is . The chance of two white balls from is , and from it is . The joint probabilities are and . Therefore , and . A common slip is to forget that the urn is chosen with unequal prior probabilities, which would give and the wrong answer . The sanity check is that the posterior must be smaller than the prior of one third, because the white-rich urn U2 is far more likely to give two white balls; the value one seventh satisfies this.
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