Vanilla Sans

In their Turing Award acceptance speech, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon discuss the heuristic search hypothesis: a physical symbol system will repeatedly generate and modify known symbol structures until the created structure matches the solution structure. Each following step depends upon the step before it, thus the heuristic search learns what avenues to pursue and which ones to disregard by measuring how close the current step is to the solution. Therefore, some possibilities will never be generated as they are measured to be less likely to complete the solution. A heuristic method can accomplish its task by using search trees. However, instead of generating all possible solution branches, a heuristic selects branches more likely to produce outcomes than other branches. It is selective at each decision point, picking branches that are more likely to produce solutions. Another example of heuristic making an algorithm faster occurs in certain search problems. Initially, the heuristic tries every possibility at each step, like the full-space search algorithm. But it can stop the search at any time if the current possibility is already worse than the best solution already found. In such search problems, a heuristic can be used to try good choices first so that bad paths can be eliminated early (see alpha–beta pruning). In the case of best-first search algorithms, such as A* search, the heuristic improves the algorithm's convergence while maintaining its correctness as long as the heuristic is admissible.