4.2 Aims of the human control experiment

People are unable accurately to describe the skill of bicycle-riding in words, so there is room to doubt whether there is one single human control strategy used. Control engineering does not offer a straightforward solution either, so one might wonder whether there might be a variety of possible strategies. This would make it `complex' under the definition adopted for this study. In turn, this might mean that a study of human control of this kind of system could reveal individual human strategies, and a study of those strategies, and their differences, could serve as a good beginning for studying human control of more complex tasks.

Accordingly, the aim of this experiment was open-ended. The lowest aim was to construct a simulation and to see if this would provide a suitable experimental vehicle. If it did, then one could continue to investigate human rules and representations of human control.

The task chosen was to `ride' the SUV freely around a 100m square area, which we may think of as an empty, level, car park. (From here on, terms appropriate to bicycle-riding will appear without quotes. The reader is asked to bear in mind that these terms are being used by way of analogy.) This task was chosen as a first one, with the idea that if it should prove successful, it would be possible to introduce further constraints into the task. The computer chosen for use was the Silicon Graphics Iris 3130, which gave good quality colour 3-D graphics with sufficient speed to use as a real-time display. The underlying bicycle simulation was very similar to the one used in testing rules, § 4.1.1.