Your willingness to try new food depends on time

In the late 1970s, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman sat in a Thai restaurant in Glendale, California, watching his friend Ralph Leighton struggle to choose between his favorite ginger chicken and a new dish. Feynman treated the indecision as a mathematical puzzle, scribbling a solution on a scrap of paper that remained undeciphered for decades. He modeled the dilemma as a problem of maximizing total pleasure over a set number of visits.