Dear Felienne!
I have written, deleted, and rewritten the start of this homework at least twenty times. I am on vacation; part of my brain is switched off, and today I just don’t have it in me to come up with a good, catchy opener that will draw our readers in. So let me just cut right to the chase…
Modeling How People Think In our last episode of Computer Science Off Course, we discussed Sherry Turkle’s book “The Second Self”.1 I have now read chapter 7, “The New Philosophers of Artificial Intelligence”, and there is this one section that stuck out to me and got me thinking. This section describes an approach to modeling human thinking, developed by early AI scientists Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. They had this idea that to arrive at a computer model of people’s thinking, one could observe people as they solve a particular problem. For instance, they observed people solving cryptarithmetic puzzles, in which digits are replaced by letters in a math equation. People were asked to talk while they solved such problems, and the researchers recorded what the participants did, what they said, and their eye movements. Subsequently, they analyzed these rich data. From these data, the different procedures and strategies people used to solve the puzzles in question could be distilled and turned into programs that simulate them. Since not all people solve problems in the same way, different programs would be developed for each type of problem. However, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell held the idea that all these different individual programs would still ”have the same general form” (p. 225) and that this general form characterizes ”how people think” (p. 225).
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