This is for the good folks at #psychat, an exercise in heuristics vs algorithms:
The challenge in Aldridge’s case was that the search team had no clear idea when — and therefore where — he fell overboard. It might have been five minutes after Sosinski went to sleep, or it might have been five minutes before he woke up. That created a potential search area the size of Rhode Island, a sweep of ocean 30 miles wide, starting at the Montauk lighthouse and extending 60 miles south. This was a big problem: In contrast to the sophisticated algorithms of Sarops, the Coast Guard’s basic searching technique is a low-tech one — human beings staring at the ocean, looking for a person’s head bobbing in the waves. An 1,800-square-mile search area would be almost impossible to cover.
Add to that the earlier calculation made by the Coast Guard:
The first calculation the search team ran that morning was a survival simulation, taking into account Aldridge’s height (5-9) and weight (150 pounds), plus the weather and water temperature. It told them that the longest Aldridge could likely stay afloat before hypothermia took over and his muscles gave out was 19 hours. But that, they knew, was a best case. The reality was that very few people survived more than three or four hours in the North Atlantic, especially without a flotation device.
I usually use a list of “problems” (that are actually just riddles), and ask students (a) to solve them, and (b) to engage in a small amount of metacognition to figure out if they solved it by way of algorithm, heuristic, or insight. The first paragraph above might be a more interesting activity, especially if students had a chance to read the article the night before.
source: A Speck in the Sea; a man overboard, 40-miles from shore, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2014.