Well, I’d say that a “general-purpose search” process is something which:
Takes in a problem or goal specification (from a fairly broad range of possible problems/goals)
… and returns a plan which solves the problem or scores well on the goal
Why not call this “general-purpose planning”? That seems to more directly describe what I think you’re describing—a goal specification comes in, a plan comes out. I think “search” has some inappropriate connotations to it, possibly evoking BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc, whereas this planning process—as you point out—doesn’t have to look like “babble/prune.”
Although now that I’ve written this, “planning” imports similar unwanted connotations from the similarly titled AI subfield. Hm. I don’t feel like I’ve produced a good enough alternative, but I still feel there’s a terminological issue here. I’ll just leave this comment for now.
I do want to evoke BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc here, because I want to make the point that those search algorithms themselves do not look like (what I believe to be most peoples’ conception of) babble and prune, and I expect the human search algorithm to differ from babble and prune in many similar ways to those algorithms. (Which makes sense—the way people come up with things like A*, after all, is to think about how a human would solve the problem better and then write an algorithm which does something more like a human.)
OK, then I once again feel confused about what this post is arguing as I remember it. (Don’t feel the need to explain it as a reply to this comment, I guess I’ll just reread if it becomes relevant later.)
Why not call this “general-purpose planning”? That seems to more directly describe what I think you’re describing—a goal specification comes in, a plan comes out. I think “search” has some inappropriate connotations to it, possibly evoking BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc, whereas this planning process—as you point out—doesn’t have to look like “babble/prune.”
Although now that I’ve written this, “planning” imports similar unwanted connotations from the similarly titled AI subfield. Hm. I don’t feel like I’ve produced a good enough alternative, but I still feel there’s a terminological issue here. I’ll just leave this comment for now.
I do want to evoke BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc here, because I want to make the point that those search algorithms themselves do not look like (what I believe to be most peoples’ conception of) babble and prune, and I expect the human search algorithm to differ from babble and prune in many similar ways to those algorithms. (Which makes sense—the way people come up with things like A*, after all, is to think about how a human would solve the problem better and then write an algorithm which does something more like a human.)
OK, then I once again feel confused about what this post is arguing as I remember it. (Don’t feel the need to explain it as a reply to this comment, I guess I’ll just reread if it becomes relevant later.)