The emergence of choice: Decision-making and strategic thinking through analogies

Consider the chess game: When faced with a complex scenario, how does understanding arise in one’s mind? How does one integrate disparate cues into a global, meaningful whole? How do players avoid the combinatorial explosion? How are abstract ideas represented? The purpose of this paper is to propose a new computational model of human chess cognition. We suggest that analogies and abstract roles are crucial to understanding a chess scenario. We present a proof-of-concept model, in the form of a computational architecture, which accounts for many crucial aspects of human play, such as (i) concentration of attention to relevant aspects, (ii) how humans may avoid the combinatorial explosion, (iii) perception of similarity at a strategic level, (iv) a state of meaningful anticipation over how a global scenario may evolve, and (v) the architecture’s choice as an emergent phenomenon from the actions of subcognitive processes.