OPTIMIZATION AND INTELLIGENCE : INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE ON THREE TYPES OF VISUALLY PRESENTED OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS
Although problem solving is an essential expression of intelligence, both experimental and differential psychology have neglected an important class of problems, for which it is difficult or impossible for systematic procedures to provide a definitive solution. A study is described, in which participants’ solutions to three such computationally difficult problems (a Travelling Salesperson, a Minimal Spanning Tree, and a Generalized Steiner Tree problem) all showed consistent individual differences that intercorrelated reliably and correlated moderately with scores on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. The results are interpreted in terms of a theory of visual perception based on detecting minimal structures and selecting transformations that maximize self-similarity. This interpretation is discussed in the context of a perspective in which intelligence is viewed as the capacity to solve problems that (either in principle or in practice) defy definitive solution by a mechanical algorithm.