In computer science, a heuristic algorithm, or simply a heuristic, is an algorithm that is able to produce an acceptable solution to a problem in many practical scenarios, in the fashion of a general heuristic, but for which there is no formal proof of its correctness. Alternatively, it may be correct, but may not be proven to produce an optimal solution, or to use reasonable resources. Heuristics are typically used when there is no known method ...
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In computer science, a heuristic algorithm, or simply a heuristic, is an algorithm that is able to produce an acceptable solution to a problem in many practical scenarios, in the fashion of a general heuristic, but for which there is no formal proof of its correctness. Alternatively, it may be correct, but may not be proven to produce an optimal solution, or to use reasonable resources. Heuristics are typically used when there is no known method to find an optimal solution, under the given constraints (of time, space etc.) or at all.
Two fundamental goals in computer science are finding algorithms with provably good run times and with provably good or optimal solution quality. A heuristic is an algorithm that abandons one or both of these goals; for example, it usually finds pretty good solutions, but there is no proof the solutions could not get arbitrarily bad; or it usually runs reasonably quickly, but there is no argument that this will always be the case.
For instance, say you...
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