Adaptive search space pruning in complex strategic problems.

ABSTRACT: People have limited computational resources, yet they make complex strategic decisions over enormous spaces of possibilities. How do people efficiently search spaces with combinatorially branching paths? Here, we study players' search strategies for a winning move in a "k-in-a-row" game. We find that players use scoring strategies to prune the search space and augment this pruning by a "shutter" heuristic that focuses the search on the paths emanating from their previous move. This strong pruning has its costs-both computational simulations and behavioral data indicate that the shutter size is correlated with players' blindness to their opponent's winning moves. However, simulations of the search while varying the shutter size, complexity levels, noise levels, branching factor, and computa

SUBMITTER: Amir O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9394844 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature