Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>, researchers describe how Feynman\u2019s interest was sparked by a lunch with his friend Ralph Leighton at a Thai restaurant in California in the 1970s. Leighton, the researchers note, was debating whether to stick with his favourite meal of ginger chicken or try a new dish.<\/p>\nFeynman turned the issue into a mathematical problem, but his work remained concealed in handwritten notes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe notes remained inscrutable for decades, until we managed to decipher them and reconstruct Feynman\u2019s original problem and solution,\u201d the team wrote.<\/p>\n
Rather than focusing on which dish to choose, using Feynman\u2019s solution, the researchers reframed the conundrum in terms of choosing which restaurant to dine at when visiting a city for a certain number of nights.<\/p>\n
According to Feynman\u2019s approach, in this context, people should try a different restaurant each night until they find one that exceeds a particular threshold that reflects a desired quality.<\/p>\n
In Feynman\u2019s equations this threshold is not fixed. Instead it declines more and more rapidly as the number of days left in the city reduces. In other words, as the days go by there is increasingly less motivation to hunt for an amazing dining spot, because the time you will have to enjoy it has decreased.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thresholds are being guided by the best thing you might be able to find if you kept looking,\u201d said Griffiths. \u201cIf you have a long time to look, finding something amazing has a lot of value because you can go back many times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Feynman\u2019s approach assumed there is equal possibility of finding any restaurant within a fixed range of quality. However the researchers also explored other scenarios.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe showed that if the distribution of restaurants varies, then the strategy you should follow will change too,\u201d said Griffiths.<\/p>\n
If a place has several awful restaurants with one or two gems, for example, the threshold starts much higher \u2013 meaning it is worth exploring for longer. By contrast if most are of similar \u2013 above average \u2013 quality, the threshold is lower, meaning it is not worth exploring for so long.<\/p>\n
While Griffiths and another author, Brian Christian from the University of Oxford, first encountered and tackled Feynman\u2019s conundrum more than a decade ago, their new work also tests how people behave.<\/p>\n
The team recruited 2,520 participants to take part in an online task, where they were asked to imagine being in a city for different periods of time. The variation in the quality of restaurants available was indicated.<\/p>\n
The participants were then presented with a grid where each square represented a restaurant and were asked to pick one for each day of their stay. Once a square \u2013 or restaurant \u2013 had been selected, its quality was revealed.<\/p>\n
The team found that rather than the threshold decreasing more and more rapidly as days left reduced, it fell linearly with the proportion of nights remaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little bit simpler than Feynman\u2019s solution, but it actually turns out to be quite good,\u201d said Griffiths. \u201cThe trick is having a threshold and then decreasing that threshold as you get closer to the end [of a trip]. And as long as you are doing something like that, that\u2019ll actually work pretty well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to exploring a new city, it can be tricky to know when to stop searching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-477963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}