Definition
Plain language
Storing each piece of a situation on its own separate dial instead of as one combined picture.
As stated in the literature
An encoding in which distinct task variables occupy near-independent directions in activation space; individually decodable but discarding the cross-variable overlap that carries relational or distance structure.
Also called: factored format, factored
Why it matters: It shows that a model can encode all the pieces of a situation and still lack the relational structure needed to plan across them.
For example, a model might track each disk's peg on its own separate dial, so you can read off where every disk sits while the model still has no internal sense of how far the whole arrangement is from the goal.
Heard on the show
“" And then position C, during move writing, the factored format partly comes back.”Episode 237 — The Model Built a Perfect Map of the Puzzle, Then Lost It