Ability to attain goals depends on building up associations, which may be simple or very complex, between particular changes in states of the world and particular actions that will (reliably or not) bring these changes about.

We have only a sketchy and incomplete knowledge of the different ways in which problems can be represented and much less knowledge of the significance of the differences.

Numbers are not the name of this game but rather representational structures that permit functional reasoning, however qualitative it may be.

Aspiration levels provide a computational mechanism for satisficing. An alternative satisfices if it meets aspirations along all dimensions. If no such alternative is found, search is undertaken for new alternatives. Meanwhile, aspirations along one or more dimensions drift down gradually until a satisfactory new alternative is found or some

human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity. The selectivity derives from various rules of thumb, or heuristics, that suggest which paths should be tried first and which leads are promising.

But they can be viewed more generally as processes for gathering information about problem structure that will ultimately be valuable in discovering a problem solution. The latter viewpoint is more general than the former in a significant sense, in that it suggests that information obtained along any particular branch of a search tree may be used

The real subjects of the new intellectual free trade among the many cultures are our own thought processes, our processes of judging, deciding, choosing, and creating. We are importing and exporting from one intellectual discipline to another ideas about how a serially organized information-processing system like a human being—or a computer, or a

In such situations, although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.

Laboratory experiments have shown that material can usually be learned more rapidly with understanding than by rote, is retained over longer periods of time, and can be transfered better to new tasks.81