Spatial and contextual factors in human performance on the travelling salesperson problem
Spatial and contextual factors in human performance on the travelling salesperson problem
复制标题
DOI：
10.1068/p2863
复制
发表时间：
1999-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
Chronicle, EP
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
MacGregor, JN;Ormerod, TC;Chronicle, EP
旅行推销员问题（TSP）提供了一个视觉空间问题解决任务的现实和实际的例子。在之前的研究中，我们发现，人类参与者为小型tsp提供的解决方案的质量与一系列计算机算法的解决方案相比要好得多。我们提出，参与者寻找解决方案的能力反映了人类感知的自然属性，通过对问题阵列的全局感知处理来从TSP点中提取最佳图形来找到解决方案。在本文中，我们扩展了人类在任务上的表现的研究，以进一步了解如何利用人类的能力来解决现实世界的tsp。实验1的结果表明，在解决更大的tsp时，解决方案的质量保持在高水平，而不是之前与人类参与者一起研究的问题，并且在问题中存在隐含的现实世界背景对性能没有影响。实验2表明，TSP点布局的规律性有助于提高性能。这在实验3中得到了证实，在实验3中也发现了点簇的内在性的影响。所有三个实验都与参与者对问题的全局、基于感知的方法一致。我们认为感知加工在空间问题解决中的作用是一个重要的理论和应用领域的进一步研究领域。
The travelling salesperson problem (TSP) provides a realistic and practical example of a visuo-spatial problem-solving task. In previous research, we have found that the quality of solutions produced by human participants for small TSPs compares well with solutions from a range of computer algorithms. We have proposed that the ability of participants to find solutions reflects the natural properties of human perception, solutions being found through global perceptual processing of the problem array to extract a best figure from the TSP points. In this paper, we extend the study of human performance on the task in order to understand further how human abilities are utilised in solving real-world TSPs. The results of experiment 1 show that high levels of solution quality are maintained in solving larger TSPs than had been investigated previously with human participants, and that the presence of an implied real-world context in the problems has no effect upon performance. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the presence of regularity in the point layout of a TSP can facilitate performance. This was confirmed in experiment 3, where effects of the internality of point clusters were also found. All three experiments were consistent with a global, perceptually based approach to the problem by participants. We suggest that the role of perceptual processing in spatial problem-solving is an important area for further research in both theoretical and applied domains.