Herbert Simon's satisficing (economics) and heuristic search (GPS/AI) are the same 'good-enough over optimal' move, applied by one person to humans and to machines

The Herbert Simon whom the vault cites as an economist — the originator of bounded rationality and satisficing (Simon 1955, "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice") in rationality-continuity-problem — is the same Herbert Simon who, with Allen Newell, built the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver and co-authored the physical symbol system hypothesis (Newell & Simon, "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search," CACM 19(3), 1976, from their 1975 ACM Turing Award lecture: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action").

The connection is not merely biographical. Satisficing and heuristic search are the same theoretical move seen from two sides: rather than compute an exhaustively optimal solution, an agent searches for one that is heuristically good enough and stops. Simon applied that move to human decision-makers (who cannot access all information or run all computations) and to machines (which cannot exhaust a combinatorial search space) — the very explosion Lighthill later blamed for symbolic AI's disappointments (claim-lighthill-1973-blamed-combinatorial-explosion, claim-lighthill-1973-named-general-problem-solving-disappointing). The "general problem-solving programs" Lighthill found disappointing were the engineering expression of a theory of bounded rationality.

This bridges two vault clusters that had been disconnected: the bounded-rationality note treated Simon 1955 purely as decision theory, while the AI-history cluster knew Newell and Simon only through the symbol-manipulation paradigm the Dreyfuses critiqued (claim-dreyfus-critique-targeted-symbolic-ai-not-neural-nets). See moc-backpropagation-origins.

The same good-enough-over-optimal move reaches into the epistemics of the symbolic-AI founders themselves: Minsky & Papert's self-flagged "intuitive judgment" that multilayer nets were sterile (claim-perceptrons-multilayer-sterile-was-conjecture) is a satisficing research judgment — and, by Simon's own theory of intuition-as-recognition, one made in exactly the low-validity setting where it is least trustworthy — argued in full at observation-simon-intuition-framework-diagnoses-perceptron-sterility-conjecture.