Problem Solving

Problem solving is the cognitive process of transforming an initial state into a goal state through a sequence of operations that reduce the difference between them. It is not merely a psychological topic — it is the fundamental pattern of all adaptive behavior, from bacterial chemotaxis to chess grandmaster play to scientific discovery. What distinguishes problem solving from mere trial-and-error is the use of heuristic structure: the agent does not search the full space of possible actions but prunes it using constraints, analogies, and subgoals that make the search tractable.

The formal study of problem solving was launched by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell in the 1950s, who showed that human problem solving could be modeled as search through a "problem space" defined by an initial state, operators, and a goal test. Their work connected psychology to artificial intelligence and to operations research, revealing that the logic of problem solving is domain-independent even though the specific heuristics are domain-specific. The insight carries through to Lindley Darden's work on mechanistic discovery: finding a mechanism is a problem-solving process whose constraints come from biological knowledge rather than from chess rules, but whose logic is the same.