Problem Solving: cognition and design

PROBLEM SOLVING: COGNITION AND DESIGN

NOTES AND COMMENTS:
HERBERT SIMON’S WORK ON
DESIGN AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS

ANIL MITRA PHD, 1985

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Document Status: May 27, 2003

Discontinued

If I need detailed ideas from Simon’s work, I can return to the original texts

In this document, I outlined for my self the contents of two of Herbert A. Simon’s works:

Models of Thought

The Sciences of the Artificial

Now, in May 2003, I find it no longer useful to maintain the outlines since I have absorbed the essence of what was useful to me into my thought and various essays

Here are some key ideas:

Models of Thought was the basis of much of the work of Simon and Newell in Artificial Intelligence

In The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon proposed that the sciences of design need and can be given a rational formulation; and he provided this formulation

Bounded rationality: that human ability to compute [and build] rational models [of actual systems] is limited and therefore design should seek satisfactory but computable solutions rather than exact or perfect but un-computable ones

Problem solving is creative search in dual spaces

Evolved systems have hierarchic depth; designed systems may be flat

In the allocation of resources, some resources should be allocated to design; the optimal quantity of such allocation can and should be estimated

Model of Emotion and an Interrupt system for incoming stimuli

Memory and its hierarchic structure; chunks – a chunk is the number of items easily or normally held in memory as a single item

Goal adjustment

Heuristics

A number of problems are equivalent to a maze - including proof

Planning is the use of landmarks to create sub-problems

Philosophy of Mind