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Heuristic Search of Heuristics

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Artificial Intelligence XL (SGAI 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14381))

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Abstract

How can we infer the strategies that human participants adopt to carry out a task? One possibility, which we present and discuss here, is to develop a large number of strategies that participants could have adopted, given a cognitive architecture and a set of possible operations. Subsequently, the (often many) strategies that best explain a dataset of interest are highlighted. To generate and select candidate strategies, we use genetic programming, a heuristic search method inspired by evolutionary principles. Specifically, combinations of cognitive operators are evolved and their performance compared against human participants’ performance on a specific task. We apply this methodology to a typical decision-making task, in which human participants were asked to select the brighter of two stimuli. We discover several understandable, psychologically-plausible strategies that offer explanations of participants’ performance. The strengths, applications and challenges of this methodology are discussed.

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Acknowledgment

Funding from the European Research Council (ERC-ADG-835002-GEMS) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Angelo Pirrone, Laura Bartlett, Noman Javed & Fernand Gobet

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

    Peter C. R. Lane

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Angelo Pirrone

Authors
  1. Angelo Pirrone
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  2. Peter C. R. Lane
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  3. Laura Bartlett
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  4. Noman Javed
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  5. Fernand Gobet
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angelo Pirrone .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

    Max Bramer

  2. DFKI: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Oldenburg, Germany

    Frederic Stahl

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Pirrone, A., Lane, P.C.R., Bartlett, L., Javed, N., Gobet, F. (2023). Heuristic Search of Heuristics. In: Bramer, M., Stahl, F. (eds) Artificial Intelligence XL. SGAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14381. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47994-6_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47994-6_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-47993-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47994-6

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