A simplified heuristic[0] for this for those interested in personal applications: it works out that you should exploit the best opportunity you come across once you’ve explored about 37% of the search space.
Note that it is if you only want the best candidate, all others being equally bad. If, instead, you are content with just a "good" candidate to avoid having to pick a terrible one, then a proposed solution is for the cutoff to be sqrt(n), where n is the number of candidates.
See "Cardinal payoff variant" in the Wikipedia page.
“And what I took away from that was that I should be able to make my own decisions about right and wrong, and whatever anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.”
A disturbing statement from a civil servant. Glad it all worked out in the end.
Aren't the raised digits an indication of endianness or something? It looks like a transmission bit pattern. Or isn't high low high low double high double low the original Apple disk format? It's something like that.
Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.
I like the sound of the word.