“The Psychology of Thinking: Embedding Artifice in Nature”, 1996 ():
Psychology as a Science of the Artificial · Search Strategies · The Limits on Performance · Limits on Speed of Concept Attainment · The Parameters of Memory-8 Seconds per Chunk · The Parameters of Memory-7 Chunks · or Is It Two? · The Organization of Memory · Stimulus Chunking · Visual Memory · The Mind’s Eye · Processing Natural Language · Semantics in Language Processing · Conclusion
Simon’s Ant: We watch an ant make his laborious way across a wind & wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he makes his weaving, halting way back to his home. So as not to anthropomorphize about his purposes, I sketch the path on a piece of paper. It is a sequence of irregular, angular segments—not quite a random walk, for it has an underlying sense of direction, of aiming toward a goal.
…Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant. On that same beach another small creature with a home at the same place as the ant might well follow a very similar path.
…An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself…In this chapter I should like to explore this hypothesis but with the word “human being” substituted for “ant”.