OP isn't right that this is greedy either. What your users are doing is an iterative search with a backoff strategy. They pursue one path through the search space, and when they don't find the solution, they remove some links (backing off) and try a new path through the search space.
The clever bit is whether you can automate their decision mechanism for how they're proceeding through the space step by step, and what points you can fall back to when something does wrong (and how to recognize when you've gone wrong).
The fact that people can do this by the seat of their pants somewhat shouldn't come as a surprise to people who study cognitive psychology, but certainly might be a surprise to engineers. After all, that's why everyone who's not a social scientist loves Malcolm Gladwell's books.
Iterative search with a backoff strategy is called backtracking, no? Seems an obvious way of solving the problem, especially since if I was to write a solver I'd definitively do it in Prolog.
To pick a nit, I don't think the human, "cognitive" strategy really has any "back-off."
In my experience (playing Monorail!) the "fast" approach is basically guess, repair, repair, repair, ... If you're trying to keep a mental stack of tentative moves to "undo," as many people do, e.g. when doing a Sudoku, that's a different, more "logical" approach, to me. The fast approach has no state except the current state of the board.
OP isn't right that this is greedy either. What your users are doing is an iterative search with a backoff strategy. They pursue one path through the search space, and when they don't find the solution, they remove some links (backing off) and try a new path through the search space.
The clever bit is whether you can automate their decision mechanism for how they're proceeding through the space step by step, and what points you can fall back to when something does wrong (and how to recognize when you've gone wrong).
The fact that people can do this by the seat of their pants somewhat shouldn't come as a surprise to people who study cognitive psychology, but certainly might be a surprise to engineers. After all, that's why everyone who's not a social scientist loves Malcolm Gladwell's books.