Explain the 'Secretary Problem'.

Explain the 'Secretary Problem'.

Approach: Describe the strategy for picking the best applicant in a sequential process.

An optimal stopping problem where you interview n candidates one by one and must decide immediately. The optimal strategy is to reject the first n/e candidates and then pick the first one better than all previous ones. Success probability is 1/e (~37%).

Follow-up: What happens as n approaches infinity?

Key concepts: optimal stopping, 1/e rule.