[jessica1994]

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interesting, my first thought was letting sqrt(n) go by, but that was obviously too low, so I gave up. but I thinking if you use judgement maybe you can use sqrt(n), I mean you just have to use judgement and realize that if n=100, and the 11th girl is slightly hotter than your sample 10, then you still reject her even though officially she would be it.

but if there is a cost of interview thing (yeah i read wiki lol) then I think sqrt(n) might be pretty good, anyone know the difference in quality between sqrt(n) and the real answer?

ok back to poker. is this problem only good for semi large numbers? I mean take poker tournament when you go through blinds and have to shove next round. 10 players, that means you get 8 hands. if the answer is let 50% go by then take best( it's not), then you would fold the first 4 unless biggies, then play the next hand that is better than the best of the first 4. since we don't do this (say first 4 hands highest card is 9), does that say something about distribution (we know how the card rankings are distributed, don't know about the distribution in the problem?).

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this is different because with poker hands you can compare the absolute value of the hand to hand rankings. with OP's problem, all you know about each woman is her relative prettiness. this problem is flawed because if you were to see a 10 walk by you would ldo choose her, even if it was before the threshold.