Newcomb's problem

In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's problem, also known as Newcomb's paradox, is a thought experiment involving a decision problem where a player must decide whether to take one or two boxes in conditions where a being, often called the "predictor", 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. However, it was first analyzed in a philosophy paper by Robert Nozick in 1969 and appeared in the March 1973 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games". Today it is a much debated problem in the philosophical branch of decision theory.