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gjm comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Beware! The optimal solution depends a lot on the exact problem statement. The goal in the SP is to maximize the probability that you end up with the best available option, and it assumes you're perfectly indifferent between that and all other possible outcomes.
That Wikipedia page discusses one variant, where each candidate has a score chosen uniformly at random between 0 and 1, and all you learn about each candidate is whether it's the best so far. Your goal is to maximize your score. With that modification, the optimal strategy turns out to be to switch from "observe" to "accept next best-so-far" much sooner than with the original SP -- after about sqrt(n) candidates.
Your actual situation when buying a house is quite different from either of these. You might want to hack up a little computer program that simulates a toy version of the house-buying process, and experiment with strategies.