Wei Ji Ma: "The Cognitive Science of Complex Planning"

Wei Ji Ma, New York University: "The cognitive science of complex planning"

Abstract
As AlphaZero has revolutionized the AI of planning in combinatorially large problems, our lack of understanding of how humans plan in such situations has come into stark focus. The cognitive science of chess, once promising, is now virtually extinct. Planning tasks widely used in the field nowadays don’t require much thinking ahead. I will show that it is possible to study human planning in tasks of intermediate complexity while maintaining experimental tractability and computational modelability. I will describe a series of experiments on a game that we call four-in-a-row -- a variant of tic-tac-toe. Inspired by best-first search, we built a heuristic computational model of human play in this game and fitted it to move-level data. The model predicts moves in unseen positions, decisions in unseen tasks, eye fixation patterns, mouse movements, and response times. Moreover, the model allows us to computationally characterize the effects of expertise and time pressure. Linking back to the chess literature, I will discuss how experts differ from novices in remembering game positions and move sequences. Finally, I will describe parallel results from a very large online data set, work on the development of planning, and neural data from a non-human primate engaged in complex planning.