Human Problem Solving

Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human Problem Solving. Prentice-Hall.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Textbook

Year

1972

Link

https://archive.org/details/humanproblemsolv0000newe

Cited from

cognitive_science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Decomposition
  • Cognitive science & problem-solving: Problem decomposition, sub-goaling, chunking in working memory, task analysis, learning hierarchies, zone of proximal development (Vygotsky)—the program Newell and Simon (1972) systematized in their account of human problem solving as recursive sub-goal generation.

    This sourceFormalizes problem solving as search through a problem space via means-ends analysis and recursive sub-goal generation.

• Heuristic

  • This sourceFoundational treatise: formalizes problem-solving as search through a problem space (initial state, goal state, operators, reachable states); establishes that representation is constructed by the solver, not given by the problem; introduces the problem-behavior graph methodology that unified cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

• Inversion
  • Problem-solving and heuristics: Pólya 1945 How to Solve It heuristic of "invert the problem" — instead of "how to prove X?" ask "how would X be false?"; Newell-Simon 1972 problem-space heuristics using backward-chaining from goal as inversion of forward-search.

    This sourceFoundational treatise: formalizes problem-solving as search through a problem space (initial state, goal state, operators, reachable states); establishes that representation is constructed by the solver, not given by the problem; introduces the problem-behavior graph methodology that unified cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

• Mental Model

  • This sourceFoundational treatise: formalizes problem-solving as search through a problem space (initial state, goal state, operators, reachable states); establishes that representation is constructed by the solver, not given by the problem; introduces the problem-behavior graph methodology that unified cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

• Problem Representation
  • Reformulation transforms problem hardness, so the same logical problem can be easy under one representation and intractable under another.
• Problem Space
  • The foundational insight, articulated by Newell and Simon (1972), is that problems do not come with intrinsic structure; structure is imposed through representation.

    This sourceFoundational treatise: formalizes problem-solving as search through a problem space (initial state, goal state, operators, reachable states); establishes that representation is constructed by the solver, not given by the problem; introduces the problem-behavior graph methodology that unified cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

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