Heuristics
Heuristic is the art and science of discovery. The word comes from the same Greek root as "eureka", meaning "to find". A heuristic is a way of directing your attention fruitfully.
The mathematician George Polya brought heuristic into popularity in the twentieth century in his book How to Solve It. He learned mathematical proofs as a student, but didn't know how mathematicians think of proofs, nor was this taught. How to Solve It is a collection of ideas about heuristic that he taught to math students: ways of looking at problems and casting about for solutions that often lead somewhere fruitful very quickly.
In computer science, a heuristic is an algorithm or procedure designed to solve a problem that ignores whether the solution is probably correct, but which usually produces a good solution or solves a simpler problem that contains or intersects with the solution of the more complex problem.
A heuristic is not guaranteed always to solve the problem, but often solves it well enough for most uses, and often does so more quickly than a more complete solution would.
External links
- http://greenlightwiki.com/heuristic A wiki devoted to heuristic.
Further reading
Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics & Biases, edited by: Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic, Cambridge University Press, 1982, trade paperback 544 pages, ISBN 0521284147
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Heuristic" http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic August 27, 2003
