Investigating Human--AI Discrepancies via Multiple-Solution Problems

Zihao Wang, Francesco Insulla, Andrea Montanari

Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models are benchmarked on whether they reach a correct answer. Yet many problems admit several correct answers and repeated attempts, by different people or by the same model resampled, trace out a distribution over them. In this work, we ask whether human and model reasoning lead to different distributions over valid solutions. Our testbed comprises 270 reasoning puzzles across five puzzle families. These multiple-solution puzzles each have 3 to 8 valid solutions and are simple enough that humans and models can solve them reliably. The resulting distributions differ markedly: models differ from one another, yet resemble each other far more than they resemble humans. Model distributions are, moreover, within every puzzle family, less diverse than human ones. We compare these discrepancies across puzzle categories, and trace how they respond to reasoning-effort settings, to prompting, and to perturbations of the puzzle that leave its solutions unchanged. Together, these results point at significant differences between human and AI problem-solving processes, and their choice among equally defensible solutions. As progressive deployment of AI…