Universal Heuristics: How Do Humans Solve 'Unsolvable' Problems?

摘要

Lots of crucial problems defeat current computer arts but yield to our brains. A great many of them can be put in the form of inverting easily computable functions. Still other problems, such as extrapolation, are related to this form. We have no idea which difficulties are intrinsic to these problems and which just reflect our ignorance. We will remain puzzled pending major foundational advances such as, e.g., on P=?NP. And yet, traveling salesmen do get to their destinations, mathematicians do find proofs of their theorems, and physicists do find patterns in transformations of their elementary particles! How is this done, and how could computers emulate their success?