What Determines Difficulty of Transport Puzzles?

What determines difficulty of solving a problem? Although this question has been studied before, we found examples which show large differences in problem difficulty which are not explained by concepts identified in previous research. This differences are caused mainly by the structure of a problems’ state spaces and cannot be easily captured by static metrics like size of the state space or the length of a solution. To address these unexplained differences, we propose a computational model of human problem solving behaviour. We provide evaluation of the model over large scale dataset (hundreds of hours of problem solving, more than 100 problem instances) for three transport puzzles (Sokoban, Rush hour, and Replacement puzzle).