The score of the battle man vs. machine sometimes looks like 1:0 for machines. The famous program “Deep blue” defeated human chess champions, and  “Watson” beat players in the quiz game Joepardy. Yet, for tasks such as image classification, not algorithms but humans are hired massively through the work platform Amazon MTurk; and not algorithms but laymen classify shapes of galaxies for astronomic research in the Galaxy Zoo project. What makes the mind so efficient in utterly complex tasks? One hypothesis is that the beauty of the mind lies in its simplicity (put forward, e.g., by the Fast and Frugal Heuristics program by Gigerenzer and the ABC research group). Humans possess the capacity to ignore information, and use only the informative signals for inferences. Here, “ignorance is a bliss”. To investigate whether the limitations of the mind are key to the precision of the mind, we used a computer game. The game, called Quantum Minds, cannot be solved analytically, nor by hill-climbing numerical optimization algorithms; but humans succeed. It was developed jointly with Professor Jacob Sherson, and the Team of the AU Ideas Center for Community Driven Research (CODER). In this talk, I will speak about the theory behind the game, the cognitive hypothesis of the less is more effect in human cognition, and present first results of the human learning data.

Jana Jarecki, Predoctoral Fellow, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition

Mac Planck Institute for Human development