New papers submitted
We've just finished wrapping up some old papirus, and they're off to the journals! It's always a soothing experience before the insults arrive. Here are the papers:
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Entanglement of perception and reasoning in a combinatorial game
We conduct a new variation of the classic chess reconstruction experiments,analyzing 25 types of possible reconstruction errors of grandmasters, masters, and beginners.The differences between the errors conducted in poor, intermediate, and strategically perfectreconstructions provide insights concerning the encoding of experts. The results obtained shedclear light into the debate concerning the importance of abstract thought (i.e., forward search)versus perceptual processes (i.e., pattern recognition). We claim that a clear solution to thisdebate is ultimately unfeasible, as our experiments demonstrate high entanglement ofperception and reasoning. Our results provide additional evidence that analogy is central tostrategic thought in chess.
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The emergence of choice: Decision-making and strategic thinking through analogies
Consider the chess game: When faced with a complex scenario, how does understanding arise in one’s mind? How does one integrate disparate cues into a global, meaningful whole? How do players avoid the combinatorial explosion? How are abstract ideas represented? The purpose of this paper is to propose a new computational model of human chess cognition. We suggest that analogies and abstract roles are crucial to understanding a chess scenario. We present a proof-of-concept model, in the form of a computational architecture, which may be able to account for many crucial aspects of human play, such as (i) concentration of attention to relevant aspects, (ii) how humans may avoid the combinatorial explosion, (iii) perception of similarity at a strategic level, (iv) a state of meaningful anticipation over how a global scenario may evolve, and (v) the architecture’s choice as an emergent phenomenon from the actions of subcognitive processes.
