Synthetic Reasoning and the Reverse Engineering of Boolean Circuits
Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, N.Y. Louis Lee · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2005
In synthetic reasoning, individuals assemble elementary components into effective systems, such as the working mechanism of an unknown device.This paper proposes a new theory of this ability, and reports two experiments investigating how individuals reverse engineer Boolean circuits with two inputs and an output.Experiment 1 supported the theory's prediction that the complexity, and hence difficulty, of synthetic reasoning problems should depend on the number of possibilities in which the assembled system works, the number of components in that system, and the relations between the component parts.Experiment 2 generalized this finding, and showed that individuals develop two distinct strategies.