Perceiver

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Boldriaan - Het Oplettende Oog (2002) ¹

Het Oplettende Oog - The Watchful Eye (2002), Schaakkunst van Boldriaan ↩︎

Perceiver,
an experimental chess program by Michael Barenfeld and Herbert Simon of the late 60s with focus on perceptual processes in problem solving. Perceiver was able to duplicate the eye movements of a chess expert by adhering to the simple relations of attack and defense, based on previously developed routines of the program Mater for detecting those basic chess relations ¹.

Contents

Fixated Squares

With the simulated fovea centralis fixated on a square of the board, information is acquired peripherally about pieces standing on nearby squares that attack or defend the fixated square, or that are attacked or defended by the piece on that square. Attention is then assumed to switch to one of these nearby squares, and, unless it immediately returns to the square already fixated, causes a saccadic movement to the new square. With the fovea fixated on the new square, the process simply repeats, causing a biased random walk of the fixation point around the board, returning most frequently to those regions of interest where relations among pieces are densest and spending little time on the edges of the board.

MAPP

Kevin J. Gilmartin and Herbert Simon further extended Perceiver into a system called MAPP (Memory-aided Pattern Perceiver) which uses the learning mechanism of EPAM, and reinforced the chunking hypothesis by subjecting MAPP to the same board reconstruction experiment that the human players faced ² ³.