I started reading an “economics of diversity” book recently, and stumbled across a great example of the power of visual analytics (included early in the book to demonstrate the value of diverse representations):
This game is hard, right? I mean I have to think about it to figure out a good move. But if you think of it visually, the right way, it is not hard. I’ll leave it as a mystery for now, and say that I can imagine a classroom exercise on this when I next teach interactive data visualization again.
Healthy Algorithms 
There is an interesitng comparioson of three problems isomortphic to this one in “The Nature of External Representations in Problem Solving”: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1997v21/i02/p0179p0217/MAIN.PDF
Thanks! Do you also happen to have a ref to the Herb Simon work on this?
Pingback: Follow-up to the classroom-worthy visual analytics example | Healthy Algorithms