Richard Feynman once turned a lunch order into a math puzzle, and 40-plus years later, scientists say his napkin math holds up, reports Live Science. In the late 1970s, the Nobel-winning physicist sketched out how an indecisive diner should decide between trying a new dish at a restaurant or returning to a favorite. His scribbled "restaurant problem" notes, long considered unreadable, have now been decoded and tested, with the analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In essence, Feynman argued that if you know you'll have a limited number of chances to choose—maybe you're visiting a city for a week and trying to pick restaurants—you should spend the first portion of those opportunities exploring, then pick the first option that's better than anything you've seen so far, per Nature. As Phys.org notes, the theory addresses the classic "explore versus exploit" dilemma—how long to keep searching for something better before committing to the best option you've already found. In theory, it can be broadly applied to hunts for jobs, apartments, and even romantic partners.
Oxford-affiliated researcher Brian Christian and colleagues reconstructed Feynman's logic in an experiment involving 2,520 online participants and a virtual city with restaurants, and concluded that Feynman's approach works. "People don't do the perfect thing, but they make nearly perfect use of their constrained resources," Christian tells Live Science. "I think this is a little bit more of a redemptive story about the human mind than we are used to from the 20th century."
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