Solution 5: Concrete or abstract?
Situation: Psychologists are always looking for new ways to examine human thought processes.
Problem: As yet no-one really knows how the human mind works. We have a subjective idea of how we think but no scientific way has been found to examine exactly how we process information and carry out cognitive tasks.
Solution: Dr. Neil Stewart, a lecturer in the Psychology Department of Warwick University, is using the current craze for Sudoku to compare how the computer solves these puzzles with how human beings tackle them. There is no shortage of people playing Sudoku and willing to talk about how they try to solve the puzzles.
Outcome: As a result of his research, Dr. Stewart argues that the computer uses its very large and fast working memory to try, by brute force, every single possible solution until it finds the correct answer.
He has discovered that people do not seem to do this. Instead they somehow intuitively know which branch is likely to lead to a dead end and which one is likely to end in success. A possible explanation is our ability to complete patterns. The human brain is rather good at filling in missing information given appropriate clues. Dr. Stewart maintains that the human brain can solve puzzles more elegantly, if not more quickly, than the fastest computer.
The solution above is either concrete or abstract. Tick the correct box.
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