Simon Newcomb

In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's problem, also known as Newcomb's paradox, is a thought experiment posing a decision problem in which a player must decide whether to choose one of two or both boxes under conditions in which a being, often called the "predictor", decides in advance what they contain, and is able to predict the player's choices with near-certainty. Newcomb's paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. It was first analyzed in a philosophy paper by Robert Nozick in 1969 and appeared in the March 1974 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games". Today it is a much debated problem in the philosophical branch of decision theory.