Cognitive effort is a concept of unquestionable utility in understanding human behaviour. However, cognitive effort has been defined in several ways in literature and in everyday life, suffering from a partial understanding. It is common to say “Pay more attention in studying that subject” or “How much effort did you spend in resolving that task?”, but what does it really mean? This contributio...

We propose a measure that quantifies the effort needed to compute a given stochastic average, considered in the context of molecular modeling. This "difficulty index" is defined in terms of CPU time, observed uncertainty, and a characteristic scale for the quantity being computed. This metric provides a focus for optimization and comparison of methods and, if applied broadly, could aid understa...

The present study attempts to apply an efficient yet simple optimization (SOPT) algorithm to optimum design of truss structures under stress and displacement constraints. The computational efficiency of the technique is improved through avoiding unnecessary analyses during the course of optimization using the so-called upper bound strategy (UBS). The efficiency of the UBS integrated SOPT algori...

When researchers make alterations to the genetic programming algorithm they almost invariably wish to measure the change in performance of the evolutionary system. No one specific measure is standard, but Koza’s computational effort statistic is frequently used [8]. In this paper the use of Koza’s statistic is discussed and a study is made of three methods that produce confidence intervals for ...