MindDecider. How much is your decision?

Situation

Making decisions

Every day, each of us makes decisions. Decision making is one of the most important activities of the human brain and a big problem on the way to creating artificial intelligence.
A decision is a process and a result of choosing a goal and a course of action. The solution can be identified:

Cost (cost) of the decision - the negative factors associated with the decision.
The profit (profitability, profit) of the decision is, accordingly, the positive factors associated with the decision.
The price of the decision is the ratio of the cost and benefit at which the decision is made.

Most decisions are made by a person spontaneously, that is, without analyzing the situation. The reason for this is the strong predominance of the profitability of the solution over the cost. In this case, the “situation analysis” incurs additional costs . However, when the cost increases or the profitability of the solution decreases, the person’s attention to the situation increases.

Uncertainty in decisions

An additional difficulty in making a decision is the uncertainty associated with the cost and benefits of the decision . According to the definition, according to Shannon, an increase in the amount of information reduces uncertainty, but under conditions of excessive information, the entropy begins to increase. According to statistics, every five years the amount of information in the world increases 10 times, that is, every five years the human brain is “obliged” to process 10 times more information to make a decision.
A person is inventive and is looking for ways to reduce uncertainty. One of these ways is the invention of money (stones, shells, coins, etc.). Today, the most important tool to reduce uncertainty is a computer. A person has already learned to process huge amounts of data to isolate information that is important for decision-making, but the cost of such analysis often lies beyond the price of the decision of an ordinary person.

Result

We have developed a software product - MindDecider

MindDecider is a software product that helps you quickly analyze the situation, plan and make decisions. MindDecider is easy to use. It can be used to select:

which marketing strategy is better;
what functionality and when it is better to develop;
what technologies to use;
where to open an office;
what gift to choose;
etc.

purpose

The main goal of the development of MindDecider is to create a software product that will deprive a person of problems related to decision making. The software product must:

Reduce the cost of analyzing a situation - for this we conducted a study of approaches to analyzing a situation and chose mind maps for presenting and editing information. We have added MindDecider with an intuitive user interface and the ability to quickly manage a software product without removing hands from the keyboard.
Reduce the uncertainty associated with the cost and benefits of the solution - for this we have introduced a flexible system of criteria that can be applied to any of the map elements. The criteria can be both positive and negative, reflecting the benefits and costs of the decision, respectively. To eliminate problems with the evaluation of criteria and solutions based on these criteria, we added a quick comparison system to MindDecider.
To provide an opportunity to plan a number of interconnected solutions - as a result of our research, the best presentation of solutions in dynamics was chosen as Gant diagrams. Solutions are very often associated with time, and MindDecider allows you to define dependencies of the criteria on time and on other criteria.
Provide the ability to collaborate - one of the versions of MindDecider is the MindDecider Team. This is a special product that allows you to work on the map and the criteria in the team. All team members can change the map, as well as set their own values of the criteria. The results of the team can be brought together using a number of algorithms.