Christian_Griffiths - Algorithms to Live By
Before he became a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon, Michael Trick was a graduate student, looking for love. “It hit me that the problem has been studied: it is the Secretary Problem! I had a position to fill [and] a series of applicants, and my goal was to pick the best applicant for the position.” So he ran the numbers. He didn’t know how many women he could expect to meet in his lifetime, but there’s a certain flexibility in the 37% Rule: it can be applied to either the number of applicants or the time over which one is searching. Assuming that his search would run from ages eighteen to forty, the 37% Rule gave age 26.1 years as the point at which to switch from looking to leaping. A number that, as it happened, was exactly Trick’s age at the time. So when he found a woman who was better match than all those he had dated so far, he knew exactly what to do. He leapt. “I didn’t know if she was Perfect (the assumptions of the model don’t allow to determine that), but there was no doubt that she met the qualifications for this step of the algorithm. So I proposed,” he writes. “And she turned me down.”