Tom Griffiths (cognitive scientist)

Thomas L. Griffiths (born circa 1978)[2] is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University.

[4] He developed a method to break down complex fencing moves into simpler ones that could be performed in sequence, but gave up on the theory after, he says, "I messed up the math and a longsword broke my right wrist.

[6][3] He applied to Stanford University for graduate school in psychology, hoping to work on mathematical models of human cognition with David Rumelhart or Roger Shepard, not realizing that both had just retired.

[6] After teaching briefly at Brown University, he moved to Berkeley in 2006 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program.

[1] On his Princeton webpage, Griffiths explains that his research explores the connection between human problem solving and related methods in computation and logic: "People solve challenging computational problems every day, making predictions about future events, learning new causal relationships, or discovering how objects should be divided into categories.

Berkeley described his work at that time as follows: "His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life.