Human Problem Solving - An Extension of Newell and Simon's Paradigm

Abstract

Several psychophysical studies on human problem solving were performed. These studies involved the following problems: the Traveling Salesman Problem, the 15-puzzle and variants of this puzzle with different sizes, and finally, the TSP with obstacles. All these problems are difficult combinatorial problems and are considered intractable. However, human subjects were found to produce near-optimal solutions very quickly. For all these problems, a pyramid algorithm was used as a model of the mental representation of the problem, and of the global-to-local process of producing the solution. This approach represents a paradigm shift in the study of human problem solving because the prior research (1) neglected mental representation of problems and (2) it concentrated on easy problems that are not solved well by humans. As a part of this project, a workshop on human problem solving was held at Purdue. After the workshop, a new journal was launched. This is the first journal dedicated to human problem solving.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 31, 2006
Accession Number
ADA457758

Entities

People

  • Zygmunt Pizlo

Organizations

  • Purdue University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Cognition
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computer Science
  • Motor Skills
  • New York
  • Operations Research
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Perception
  • Psychology
  • Simulations
  • Students
  • Thinking
  • Universities
  • Visual Perception
  • Websites
  • Workshops

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Operations Research
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.