ABSTRACT

If not the only one, interdependencies certainly constitute a major source of difficulty in human problem-solving because local processes of search in one dimension propagate their effects over other parts of the system in ways which are very hard to understand, foresee and control. If interdependencies are widespread, only global search procedures which simultaneously control all the dimensions of the problem are fully effective, while local search procedures get quickly stuck into a local optimum. Unfortunately human beings find it very hard to control for more than one or very few dimensions at a time and are typically bound to use search strategies which are very similar to local trial-and-error and implicitly assume complete separability among dimensions by varying only one (or very few) of them in order to find better solutions (Bruner et al. 1956). The sheer combinatorial problem implied by interdependencies makes them intractable by our mind, whose short memory resources are well known to be highly limited.