Overview
- A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 2, 2026 decodes Richard Feynman’s handwritten notes and proves his threshold rule is the mathematically optimal solution to the restaurant dilemma.
- Feynman’s rule tells you to compare your best option so far to a threshold that starts high and falls as remaining opportunities shrink, and to settle when the best-so-far exceeds that threshold.
- The researchers extended Feynman’s single-restaurant model to choices among multiple restaurants and to situations where most options are poor but a few are exceptional, showing the threshold formula shifts with the quality distribution.
- To test behavior, the team ran online experiments with more than 2,500 participants and found people did not compute the exact optimal rule but used simple heuristics that closely approximated the optimal outcomes.
- The work ties decades-old notes — saved and partially transcribed by Ralph Leighton and later fully read by others — to formal decision theory and measurable human behavior, improving how we understand everyday search-and-settle choices.