Heuristic

A heuristic is a practical problem-solving strategy or rule of thumb that provides a good-enough solution when finding the optimal answer is computationally infeasible or too time-consuming. In artificial intelligence, heuristics have a long history dating back to early search algorithms like A* search, where heuristic functions estimate the cost to reach a goal state and guide exploration efficiently. Heuristics are widely used in game-playing AI, scheduling optimization, and robotic process automation where exhaustive search is impractical. While heuristics do not guarantee optimal solutions, they often provide excellent performance in practice with significantly lower computational cost. In modern machine learning, heuristic approaches inform decisions about hyperparameter tuning, weight initialization, and reward shaping in reinforcement learning. The balance between heuristic-driven and learned approaches remains an active area of research in AI system design.