The ubiquity of discovery

As scientists interested in studying the phenomenon of “intelligence”, we first choose a view of Man, develop a theory of how intelligent behavior is managed, and construct some models which can test and refine that theory. The view we choose is that Man is a processor of symbolic information. The theory is that sophisticated cognitive tasks can be cast as searches or explorations, and that each human possesses (and efficiently accesses) a large body of informal rules of thumb (or heuristics) which constrain his search. The source of what we colloquially call “intelligence” is seen to be very efficient searching of an a priori immense space. Some computational models which incorporate this theory are described.