Resource-rational analysis confirms the Anderson leg but not the Werbos leg of the optimization-as-theory-of-mind bridge

The vault's two-lineages note held that Werbos's optimal-control approximate dynamic programming and Anderson's rational analysis make the same "optimization as a theory of mind" bet from two disciplines, and it named resource-rational analysis (Lieder & Griffiths 2020, Behavioral and Brain Sciences) as the candidate tightest convergence point — the place the two might stop being an analogy and become the same mathematics. Reading the primary settles it as a clean partial disconfirmation.

The Anderson leg holds. Resource-rational analysis describes itself, in the authors' own words, as an extension of rational analysis pushed toward Marr's algorithmic level (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis) — a real, explicit, quotable convergence.

The Werbos leg does not. The "bounded optimization under real compute limits" half of the synthesis — the piece the original question hoped would connect to Werbos's approximate dynamic programming — is instead built on Horvitz and Russell's bounded optimality, a separate 1980s–1990s AI tradition (claim-resource-rational-analysis-descends-from-bounded-optimality-not-werbos-adp). The formalism confirms the split: an expected-utility functional minus an explicit compute-cost term (claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost), not the Bellman recursion of the adaptive-critic architecture. Werbos's name, ADP, and the adaptive critic appear nowhere in the paper.

So the specific hypothesis — that resource-rational analysis is where Werbos's ADP and Anderson's rational analysis meet — is not supported by the source. One side of the proposed bridge holds (Anderson); the other is a different bridge entirely (Horvitz/Russell). What the finding leaves standing is a sharper question the vault did not start with: two historically distinct AI traditions — Werbos's control-theory ADP and Horvitz/Russell's bounded-optimality AI — both arrived at "optimize under bounded compute," and cognitive science borrowed from only one when it built resource-rational analysis. Whether those two traditions ever converge with each other is a new, better-scoped thread, left here as a forward lead rather than a routed promise. This note answers question-resource-rational-analysis-sharpest-werbos-anderson-bridge.