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by kmundnic 3370 days ago
Although this result sets up in some way a baseline, n (the number of choices) should be a random variable N in order to make things a bit more realistic.

Edit: A brief comment on this case is mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem#Unknown_numb...

2 comments

The `1/e-law of best choice` mentioned on there was interesting, and helped me accept the conclusion regarding finding love. With the previous examples, love and similar concepts didn't seem like they would work well when N could theoretically be infinite. Though, after some help understanding the wiki explanation [1], applying the rule over the finite _period of time_ during which you see options, rather than the total number of options, makes much more sense and seems more agreeable.

[1]: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/840196/how-to-use-th...

That's intriguing!