The Secretary Problem

I found a home to purchase by implementing this. I visited two places to establish criteria, then built a simple search across Greater London on Rightmove using area searches with proximity to Waitrose. The results I then filtered again based on price per square foot and rejecting certain keywords (aiming for a price per sq ft between £500-600 without needing renovation, but looking for no chain + quick sale). As soon as a high quality and low price to square…

I was asked a version of this as an interview question a few months ago. Despite recognizing the form of it immediately and giving some intuition for why it converges to 1/e, the interviewer had nothing else prepared and had expected it to be new to me, so he took me through a brutal one hour of his personal "guided proof" of the answer, including drawing a massive grid on a whiteboard and stepping through iterations. At one point I…

The section on experimental studies touches on it briefly, but it's important to note that costs involved in the selection process are not considered in the standard construction of the problem. From wikipedia: > In large part, this work has shown that people tend to stop searching too soon. This may be explained, at least in part, by the cost of evaluating candidates. and then > For example, when trying to decide at which gas station to stop for gas…

This can be made much more efficient if you just take all of the applications and throw half of them away. This will ensure that all the remaining applicants are luckier than the average applicant.