Overview
- The fully deciphered handwritten notes by Richard Feynman and a formal analysis were published in PNAS in early June 2026, presenting a complete statement of the ‘restaurant dilemma’ and its solution.
- The authors prove Feynman’s rule is mathematically optimal and extend it to a broader class of optimal-stopping problems that govern when to stop exploring and start exploiting.
- Researchers tested the theory with 2,520 participants who imagined living in cities for different lengths of time and found people set decision thresholds that fall roughly linearly as the number of remaining choices decreases.
- Experimental results show people explore a bit more than the pure optimal rule predicts and that different quality distributions shift the threshold intercepts while leaving the slope of the linear rule unchanged.
- The work links a decades-old anecdote to modern decision theory and suggests simple, nearly optimal heuristics can explain everyday choices from picking a meal to searching for housing or jobs.