Optimal Stopping

Still not reached the optimal stopping point. Will update this page once I do reach.

While reading the very interesting book (that I would definitely recommend to almost anyone!), "Algorithms to Live By", by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths I was really intrigued by the so called "Secretary Hiring Problem" - more formally known as the "Optimal Stopping Problem". The setup for the secretary version of the problem is as follows:

1. You need to hire one secretary. You obviously want to hire the "best" which for the purpose of this exercise we say can be measured by one metric that describes the competency

2. After floating an advertisement, you allow candidates to interview with you. As candidates do - they come in a completely unsorted order.

3. A candidate can either be hired or rejected. Once a candidate is hired, the interview process stops. One major constraint is that once a candidate is rejected, you cannot call them back for an interview or then hire them. Basically there is no waiting list that can be made.

4. So the problem can be summarized as - find the best secretary while sequentially looking at candidates while hiring once or rejecting and never seeing that person again.

I quickly translated this problem into a MATLAB live script just so that I could play around with what ends up being a statistical game.