How to Create an Area When Playing against a Machine.

How would human players negotiate a spatial array with a randomly behaving partner? In an interactive, online, zero-sum grid game, we tested whether and how players create areas and place sequences by coloring-in places in a 20 × 20 matrix (261 human adults, 261 machine partners, N = 522). Several indicators showed that human players followed an intentional strategy rather than coloring in places ad libitum. First, human players built a larger largest cluster from places than the machine. Second, they were sensitive to task instructions and could modify their strategy accordingly. When instructed to build an area, they built a bigger one. When set under time pressure, they colored-in faster and only had time to build a smaller cluster from places. Third, the most compelling human strategy to create an area was lining up pathways (place sequencing). Despite these differences, the resulting spatial field structure was similar in human and machine players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]