Related papers: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
Discuss several tricks for solving twenty question problems which in this paper is depicted as a guessing game. Player tries to find a ball in twenty boxes by asking as few questions as possible, and these questions are answered by only…
We discuss some old common knowledge puzzles and introduce a lot of new common knowledge puzzles.
We review the current status of dimensions, as the result of a long and controversial history that includes input from philosophy and physics. Our conclusion is that they are subjective but essential concepts which provide a kind of…
The purpose of this note is to raise two different questions, which are rarely if ever considered, and to which, it seems, we lack convincing, systematic answers. These questions can be posed as: - Why do we compute? - What do we compute?…
The chinese room problem asks if computers can think; I ask here if most humans can.
People reason heuristically in situations resembling inferential puzzles such as Bertrand's box paradox and the Monty Hall problem. The practical significance of that fact for economic decision making is uncertain because a departure from…
This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when…
Machines are being increasingly used in decision-making processes, resulting in the realization that decisions need explanations. Unfortunately, an increasing number of these deployed models are of a 'black-box' nature where the reasoning…
We investigate the complexity of a puzzle that turns out to be NL-complete.
In the last years many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The…
Creativity is individual, and it is social. The social aspects of creativity have become of increasing interest as systems have emerged that mobilize large numbers of people to engage in creative tasks. We examine research related to…
The paper attempts to describe the space of possible mind designs by first equating all minds to software. Next it proves some interesting properties of the mind design space such as infinitude of minds, size and representation complexity…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
People regularly make inferences about objects in the world that they cannot see by flexibly integrating information from multiple sources: auditory and visual cues, language, and our prior beliefs and knowledge about the scene. How are we…
What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully capture the…
Trying to be effective (no matter who exactly and in what field) a person face the problem which inevitably destroys all our attempts to easily get to a desired goal. The problem is the existence of some insuperable barriers for our mind,…
This paper collects some problems that I have encountered during the years, have puzzled me and which, to the best of my knowledge, are still open. Most of them are well-known and have been first stated by other authors. In this sad season…
We study the famous mathematical puzzle of prisoners and hats. We introduce a framework in which various variants of the problem can be formalized. We examine three particular versions of the problem (each one in fact a class of problems)…
It has for ages been a rather constant feature of thinking in science to take it for granted that the respective thinking happens in realms which are totally outside and independent of all the other phenomena that constitute the objects of…