How Do You Solve Problems?

I was reading a very interesting article by Steve Pavlina called How the mind really works, if you haven't visited his site please do!

He was examining how the human mind solves new problems that it has not encountered before. He then compared that to how computers handled new problem solving. I found this to be very interesting.

I'm going to list a couple of comment he made and add some thoughts to them:

"The reason [we can still recognize patterns in a split second that a computer can’t figure out with days of continuous processing] is the unique way human beings store and process patterns. "

Store and Process. I can agree with this. I am curious to know if there are systems that attempt to mimic the way human's store information. I know there are neural nets, but from all I read they appear to mimic the thought process rather then the storage of information.

I am curious to know if there are systems out there that try to mimic the way human's store information. I know there are Neural Nets out there but from what I have read they appear to mimic the thought process rather then the storage of humans.

Your mind stores and processes information in what are called invariant representations.

Your mind strives to identify and save general patterns

Just to clarify, he goes on to state that the memory is stored in some sort of "fuzzy" pattern. This pattern is what is known as a invariant representation. This does not change, we just re-categorize it.

Your entire life’s worth of knowledge is stored in your mind as associatively linked, hierarchically organized, invariant representations.

An interesting exercise would be to come up with a system that could store and retrieve information stored in this fashion

You don’t need to process the complex sensory data from the car the same way you did the first time you saw a car.

This line made me think, the mind must have a way to take a complex set of data and distill it down to a general representation. Perhaps when we encounter something for the first time we make many representations for it. We then delete the incorrect one's until a particular one fits the mold. All the representations that we deleted are then stored as "like" representation. "It looks like a car but not quite." Maybe this is the way the mind goes from the representation of something unknown to the representation of something known.

There must be some basic representation models that we start from and we build our entire library from these...IE: All items fall into an Alive or Not Alive representation.

I think the reason your mind stores the unexpected experiences in far greater detail than the routine ones is to give it the opportunity to later process those memories into invariant forms.

I thought that this line of thought fits easily into my thinking.

Another way of saying this is that the more intelligent you become, the less you’re surprised by reality.

A great quote. If it fits a representation I know then it will not surprise me that it exists.

To sum it all up, a great article to get you thinking about how you think.