The Sciences of the Artificial (The MIT Press)

by Herbert A. Simon

Here are the rules of a game, which I shall call number scrabble. The game is played by two people with nine cards—let us say the ace through the nine of hearts. The cards are placed in a row, face up, between the two players. The players draw alternately, one at a time, selecting any one of the cards that remain in the center. The aim of the game is for a player to make up a “book,” that is, a set of exactly three cards whose spots add to 15, before his opponent can do so. The first player who makes a book wins; if all nine cards have been drawn without either player making a book, the game is a draw. What is a good strategy in this game? How would you go about finding one? If the reader has not already discovered it for himself, let me show how a change in representation will make it easy to play the game well. The magic square here, which I introduced in the third chapter, is made up of the numerals from 1 through 9. 4 9 2 3 5 7 8 1 6 14. As examples of current thinking about representation see chapters 5 (“Representing Designed Artifacts”) and 6 (“Representing Design Processes”) in C. L. Dym, op. cit., and chapter 6 (“Representation in Design”) in O¨mer Akin, op. cit. For a more general theoretical discussion, see R. E. Korf, “Toward a Model of Representational Changes,” Artificial Intelligence, 14(1980):41-78. Each row, column, or diagonal adds to 15, and every triple of these numerals that add to 15 is a row, column, or diagonal of the magic square. From ...

saw that in math museum, wonder if developed by the author?