# People use fast, goal-directed simulation to reason about novel games

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [From Word Models to World Models: Translating from Natural Language to the Probabilistic Language of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12672/) (2023)
- [Structured, flexible, and robust: benchmarking and improving large language models towards more human-like behavior in out-of-distribution reasoning tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05718/) (2022)
- [People construct simplified mental representations to plan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06948/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12821/) (2025)
- [Are Large Language Models Reliable AI Scientists? Assessing Reverse-Engineering of Black-Box Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17968/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Language Models' Evaluations of Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10930/) (2025)
- [Ludax: A GPU-Accelerated Domain Specific Language for Board Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22609/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

People can evaluate features of problems and their potential solutions well before we can effectively solve them. When considering a game we have never played, for instance, we might infer whether it is likely to be challenging, fair, or fun simply from hearing the game rules, prior to deciding whether to invest time in learning the game or trying to play it well. Many studies of game play have focused on optimality and expertise, characterizing how people and computational models play based on moderate to extensive search and after playing a game dozens (if not thousands or millions) of times. Here, we study how people reason about a range of simple but novel Connect-N style board games. We ask people to judge how fair and how fun the games are from very little experience: just thinking about the game for a minute or so, before they have ever actually played with anyone else, and we propose a resource-limited model that captures their judgments using only a small number of partial game simulations and almost no look-ahead search.