Computer Science
In computer science, a heuristic is a technique designed for solving a problem quicker when classic methods are too slow, or for finding an approximate solution when classic methods fail to find any exact solution. By trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, and/or precision for speed, a heuristic can quickly produce a solution that is good enough for solving the problem at hand, as opposed to finding all exact solutions in a prohibitively long time.
For example, many real-time anti-virus scanners use heuristic signatures for detecting viruses and other forms of malware.
One way of achieving this computational performance gain consists in solving a simpler problem whose solution is also a solution to the more complex problem. See the main article for more details.
Read more about this topic: Heuristic
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