Information Acquisition Under Resource Limitations in a Noisy
  Environment
  We introduce a theoretical model of information acquisition under resource
limitations in a noisy environment. An agent must guess the truth value of a
given Boolean formula $\varphi$ after performing a bounded number of noisy
tests of the truth values of variables in the formula. We observe that, in
general, the problem of finding an optimal testing strategy for $\phi$ is hard,
but we suggest a useful heuristic. The techniques we use also give insight into
two apparently unrelated, but well-studied problems: (1) \emph{rational
inattention}, that is, when it is rational to ignore pertinent information (the
optimal strategy may involve hardly ever testing variables that are clearly
relevant to $\phi$), and (2) what makes a formula hard to learn/remember.
