The Dating Problem, Revisited.

How many dates should you go on before you settle down?

The classic “secretary” problem has many names and guises but it’s essentially a mathematical decision theory problem that goes like this: imagine you are interviewing a pool of candidates, and you want to find the best one, but you are under time constraints. The interviewees arrive in random order, and you evaluate each one with a “score” — but you have to decide if you want to hire them on the spot, or else pass them up and move to the next person. No backsies! So…what’s your algorithm for nabbing the best person? You…