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Beyond Simon’s Means-Ends Analysis: Natural Creativity and the Unanswered ‘Why’ in the Design of Intelligent Systems for Problem-Solving

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Abstract

Goal-directed problem solving as originally advocated by Herbert Simon’s means-ends analysis model has primarily shaped the course of design research on artificially intelligent systems for problem-solving. We contend that there is a definite disregard of a key phase within the overall design process that in fact logically precedes the actual problem solving phase. While systems designers have traditionally been obsessed with goal-directed problem solving, the basic determinants of the ultimate desired goal state still remain to be fully understood or categorically defined. We propose a rational framework built on a set of logically inter-connected conjectures to specifically recognize this neglected phase in the overall design process of intelligent systems for practical problem-solving applications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratefulness to the assigned editor of their submission and also to the peer reviewers for their valuable time in perusing and deeming this work as publishable. The authors would also like to dedicate this article to Professor Aaron Sloman whose ideas and work was a major source of motivation in their work; and would also wish to gratefully acknowledge Professor Sloman’s constructive comments in his electronic correspondences with the first author. The first author would like to appreciate the support from UQ Business School in the form of a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the time when preliminary work on this article was being initiated; at which time he was affiliated with the UQ Business School as a Research Fellow. The second author would like to appreciate the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant No. 70771019 at the time of working on this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

    Sukanto Bhattacharya

  2. UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Yonggui Wang & Dongming Xu

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  1. Sukanto Bhattacharya
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  2. Yonggui Wang
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  3. Dongming Xu
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Correspondence to Sukanto Bhattacharya.

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Bhattacharya, S., Wang, Y. & Xu, D. Beyond Simon’s Means-Ends Analysis: Natural Creativity and the Unanswered ‘Why’ in the Design of Intelligent Systems for Problem-Solving. Minds & Machines 20, 327–347 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-010-9198-7

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