Newcomb's paradox

Newcomb's paradox is a tricky puzzle about whether it is better to choose one option or two options. Imagine there is a box with two identical compartments. One compartment has a million dollars in it, and the other has either nothing or a thousand dollars. You can take both compartments, or just take the one with the million dollars. Now here's the tricky part: someone else knows ahead of time which compartment has the thousand dollars. So if they predicted it correctly, you have to choose between two options: get one million dollars for sure OR get a million plus the thousand if the other person guessed correctly. So what do you do?

This is an example of Newcomb's paradox. It's a tricky puzzle because there are two possible outcomes. On the one hand, it seems like it would make the most sense to just take the one million for sure. But on the other hand, if the other person predicted correctly, then you would get a million and a thousand, which is better than just a million. The paradox is that there is no definite answer to what you should do. It's up to you to decide which option is best.