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Physicist Richard Feynman’s forgotten notes on ‘the restaurant problem’ finally deciphered after 50 years

Researchers cracked a 50-year-old math problem scribbled by Richard Feynman over lunch. The equations show that humans are better decision-makers than scientists once thought.

By Larissa G. Capella, published yesterday, in News

It started with a plate of ginger chicken. In the late 1970s, physicist Richard Feynman — best known for his earlier work on the Manhattan Project — sat down for lunch with his friend Ralph Leighton at a restaurant in Glendale, California. Leighton was agonizing over ordering his usual favorite, or risking something new.

Feynman turned the choice into a math problem, and solved it on a piece of notebook paper. His equation showed exactly when Leighton — or any indecisive diner, for that matter — should stop taking risks and stick with what one knows is good.

For decades, Feynman’s notes on the “restaurant problem” were unreadable. But now, researchers reconstructed a decision-making problem from Richard Feynman’s previously undeciphered notes and proved him to be right. The findings were published on June 1 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The problem with picking lunch

Imagine you’re visiting a new city for a week. Each night, you can either try an unknown restaurant or return to the best one you’ve already found. You want to maximize your total dining experience over the whole trip.

That kind of problem has a name in mathematics: an “optimal stopping problem.” The same logic shows up in apartment hunting and job searching. But Feynman argued you can always go back to a previous restaurant. The goal is to maximize your cumulative enjoyment, not just find the single best spot. You may like

Feynman’s notes showed that the optimal strategy involves a quality threshold — a minimum score you require before committing — that starts high and drops as your trip runs out.

Brian Christian, a computer scientist and cognitive scientist at University of Oxford, began working on the problem about 13 years ago alongside his collaborator Tom Griffiths. They tracked down Feynman’s original notes through the Feynman Lectures website.

Continue/Read Original Article: Manhattan Project physicist Richard Feynman’s forgotten notes on ‘the restaurant problem’ deciphered after 50 years | Live Science