shaman

n. in various indigenous cultures, especially those that include nature and ancestor worship, a male or female spiritual leader who uses allegedly supernatural or magical powers for divination (particularly diagnosis) and to heal mental or physical illness. The status of shamans is not conferred by recognized organizations but is held to arise from a significant personal physical or mental crisis or to be hereditary. Shamanism includes a wide spectrum of traditional beliefs and practices, many of which involve communication with the spirit and animal worlds in pursuit of physical or mental healing. —shamanic adj. —shamanistic adj.

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Psychology term of the day

May 9th 2024

state space

1. a graphical representation used to characterize game playing and other search-based problem solving. A state space has four components: (a) a set of nodes or states, (b) a set of arcs linking subsets of the nodes, (c) a nonempty set of nodes indicated as the start nodes of the space, and (d) a nonempty set of goal nodes of the space. The goal nodes are identified by either a property of the state itself (e.g., a checkmate) or a property of the path leading to the goal state (e.g., the shortest path). An architecture such as a production system or classifier system can generate a state-space search. Computational state-space analysis and computer simulations of problem solving often are used as well in the study of how people pursue goal-directed behavior. See also graph; search; tree.

2. multidimensional space, particularly as related to the depiction of the results of classification methods used to group objects with similar characteristics and patterns of behavior.