Sleeping Beauty Problem

The Sleeping Beauty problem is a puzzle in decision theory in which an ideally rational epistemic agent is to be woken once or twice according to the toss of a coin, and asked her degree of belief for the coin having come up heads.

The problem was originally formulated in unpublished work in the mid 1980s by Arnold Zuboff (work that was later published as "One Self: The Logic of Experience"), followed by a paper by Adam Elga and is related to problems of imperfect recall such as the "paradox of the absent minded driver". The name "Sleeping Beauty" was given to the problem by Robert Stalnaker and was first used in extensive discussion in the Usenet newsgroup rec.puzzles in 1999.

Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details: On Sunday she will be put to sleep. Once or twice, during the experiment, Beauty will be awakened, interviewed, and put back to sleep with an amnesia-inducing drug that makes her forget that awakening. A fair coin will be tossed to determine which experimental procedure to undertake: if the coin comes up heads, Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Monday only. If the coin comes up tails, she will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday. In either case, she will be awakened on Wednesday without interview and the experiment ends.

Any time Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed she will not be able to tell which day it is or whether she has been awakened before. During the interview Beauty is asked: "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?".

This problem continues to produce ongoing debate.

The thirder position argues that the probability of heads is 1/3. Adam Elga argued for this position originally as follows: Suppose Sleeping Beauty is told and she comes to fully believe that the coin landed tails. By even a highly restricted principle of indifference, her credence that it is Monday should equal her credence that it is Tuesday since being in one situation would be subjectively indistinguishable from the other. In other words, P(Monday | Tails) = P(Tuesday | Tails), and thus

...
Wikipedia