Strategy Representation—An Analysis of Planning Knowledge

Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge describes an innovative methodology for investigating the conceptual structures that underlie human reasoning. This work explores the nature of planning strategies--the abstract patterns of planning behavior that people recognize across a broad range of real world situations. With a sense of scale that is rarely seen in the cognitive sciences, this book catalogs 372 strategies across 10 different planning domains: business practices, education, object counting, Machiavellian politics, warfare, scientific discovery, personal relationships, musical performance, and the anthropomorphic strategies of animal behavior and cellular immunology.

Noting that strategies often serve as the basis for analogies that people draw across planning situations, this work attempts to explain these analogies by defining the fundamental concepts that are common across all instances of each strategy. By aggregating evidence from each of the strategy definitions provided, the representational requirements of strategic planning are identified. The important finding is that the concepts that underlie strategic reasoning are of incredibly broad scope. Nearly 1,000 fundamental concepts are identified, covering every existing area of knowledge representation research and many areas that have not yet been adequately formalized, particularly those related to common sense understanding of mental states and processes. An organization of these concepts into 48 fundamental areas of knowledge and representation is provided, offering an invaluable roadmap for progress within the field.