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[-] tal@lemmy.today 36 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The moral of the story is "Buy the first camel."

Nah, there's information to be gained via the selection process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

The secretary problem demonstrates a scenario involving optimal stopping theory that is studied extensively in the fields of applied probability, statistics, and decision theory. It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem. Its solution is also known as the 37% rule.

The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of n rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.

The shortest rigorous proof known so far is provided by the odds algorithm. It implies that the optimal win probability is always at least 1/e (where e is the base of the natural logarithm), and that the latter holds even in a much greater generality. The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first ∼n/e applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs). Sometimes this strategy is called the 1/e stopping rule, because the probability of stopping at the best applicant with this strategy is already about 1/e for moderate values of n. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether there are 100 or 100 million applicants.

[-] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago
[-] Brown5500@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

lemmynsfw would like a word

this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
544 points (99.1% liked)

The Far Side

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Hello fellow Far Side fans!

About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.

The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side

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