My guess is that’s some sort of parallel Monte Carlo search driven by complex, partially innate and partially learned, heuristics.
One of the cooler papers I’ve seen connecting MC with thinking is http://www.stanford.edu/~ngoodman/papers/LiederGriffithsGoodman2012NIPS.pdf which claims that MCMC can even explain some cognitive biases. (I don’t know as much about MCMC as I would like, so I can’t evaluate it.)
One of the cooler papers I’ve seen connecting MC with thinking is http://www.stanford.edu/~ngoodman/papers/LiederGriffithsGoodman2012NIPS.pdf which claims that MCMC can even explain some cognitive biases. (I don’t know as much about MCMC as I would like, so I can’t evaluate it.)