Heuristic

Heuristic is the art and science of discovery and invention. The word comes from the same Greek root as “eureka”. (…omitted…) A heuristic is a way of directing your attention fruitfully. The term was introduced by Pappus of Alexandria.

컴퓨터 과학

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 gives up 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. Often, one can find specially crafted problem instances where the heuristic will in fact produce very bad results or run very slowly; however, these instances might never occur in practice because of their special structure. Therefore, the use of heuristics is very common in real world implementations.