Adaptive search space pruning in complex strategic problems
Fig 5
Participants who exhibited a narrower shutter were more likely to find the winning move, but were also more likely to miss winning moves for the ‘O’ player.
A) Illustration of the shutter heuristic: assuming the player’s last move was f5 (shown in a black circle), there are three potential paths to win induced by this move, f6–f3, f5–f2 and c5–f5 (their squares marked in blue). Squares on these paths are considered at distance 0 from the last move. Squares adjacent to these squares (Manhattan distance = 1) are considered at distance 1 from the last move (marked in orange). B) The probability to find the winning move of participants with different shutter sizes. All differences were statistically significant: **, p < 0.005 ***, p < 0.001. C) The proportion between the probability for missed ‘X’ winning moves and the probability of missed ‘O’ winning moves in the computational simulations (left) and by participants (right). Narrow shutter shown in blue, medium in orange and wide in green. Differences between narrow and wide shutter size and medium and wide shutter size were statistically significant, ***, p < 0.001. All error bars are 95% confidence intervals.