There is a magic number. It’s 37 per cent

You just got married and yoursquore ready to move out of your oneroom bachelorette into a proper dream house You and the love of your life start checking out apartments for rent Every weekend you drive around inspecting prospective homesThe first one gets no sunlight The second is on a low floor and will have far too many mosquitoes Another one has a giant kitchen and a closetsized bedroom The fourth one is perfect but you decide to keep looking because you canrsquot just take the first best option rightHerersquos my question if yoursquore looking for place to live how many apartments good and bad will you reject before you get to yes even though a little voice says something a little better might be just around the next cornerOn an average Mumbai day you will go through variations of this problem again and again Yoursquore searching for a parking space at the mall How many will you skip before deciding yoursquore not going to find anything better than the one you just foundYoursquore searching for a good new restaurant to eat in How many will you explore on Google before settling for oneYoursquore looking for a soul mate No one checks all the boxes but you definitely want Miss or Mister Perfect so you keep looking When will you say enough the next one is the oneTurns out this very human predicament is known as the Optimal Stopping problem and is one of the oldest problems of mathematics Its more popular version described in 1958 by the man who coined the word software American mathematician Merrill Flood is the Secretary ProblemYoursquore hiring a secretary 100 candidates are waiting to be interviewed After each interview you must decide yes or no Say yes and the remaining candidates will disappear Say no and the one you just interviewed will go away forever The 100th one is most unlikely to be the best But when should you decide to go with the next best candidate whorsquos better than the ones that came before herCandidate 1 meets that criterion because there was no one before her The second one has a 5037 of being better or worse than the first But alas the first is gone forever since you rejected her so yoursquore stuck with 2 for better or worse So you go for the third interview Except that this one has only a one in three chance of being the best The more candidates you interview the lower their odds of being the top pick as the pool gets largerWhen you finally choose whether a secretary or a parking spot or a spouse you know you might have found something better if yoursquod looked longer Or notSo when to stop lookingThe good news is that if you postponed taking a decision until yoursquod explored 3737 of your options and then jumped at the next one that stood out yoursquod do just about as well as if yoursquod explored all the options Itrsquos called the LookThenLeap ruleThe magic number is 3737 You decide to search for a parking space for 20 minutes Following the 3737 LookThenLeap rule yoursquod just look for the first 7 minutes and then go with the next spot that met your criteriaYou decide to search for a soulmate till you hit 40 years Yoursquore 18 years old now so you plan to search for 22 years The 3737 rule tells you to put off a decision till age 26 but date like hell After that age say yes to the next woman or man who gives you a nice buzzy feelingOf course he or she might turn you down because shersquos not reached her 3737 line yet but hey hard cheeseSeen from the 3737 perspective arranged marriages begin to make a different sense The spiking divorce rates worldwide tell us that endless searching doesnrsquot improve your odds of finding that perfect person or being happy ever after In fact you have the highest chance of getting a winner 5037 when you just go for the next likely partner Just like your ageing parents did Hidden in all this is secret wisdom in real life we donrsquot search till we find the very best We stop arbitrarily and settle for second bestThe difference between the Secretary Problem and real life is that sometimes you can go back to a better choiceJohannes Kepler the astronomer who showed that planets had elliptical orbits became a widower in 1611 and started looking for a new wife No one quite fit his checklist and he kept rejecting one after another a total of 11 women However 5 incidentally the first woman hersquod met after crossing the 3737 line mdash had impressed him because ldquoof her tall build and athletic bodyrdquo He went back and proposed to her and was acceptedKepler and Susanna Reuttinger married and had six children Their life was described as peaceful and joyousHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcom Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper