Features
Trial and error has a number of features:
- solution-oriented: trial and error makes no attempt to discover why a solution works, merely that it is a solution.
- problem-specific: trial and error makes no attempt to generalise a solution to other problems.
- non-optimal: trial and error is generally an attempt to find a solution, not all solutions, and not the best solution.
- needs little knowledge: trials and error can proceed where there is little or no knowledge of the subject.
It is possible to use trial and error to find all solutions or the best solution, when a testably finite number of possible solutions exist. To find all solutions, one simply makes a note and continues, rather than ending the process, when a solution is found, until all solutions have been tried. To find the best solution, one finds all solutions by the method just described and then comparatively evaluates them based upon some predefined set of criteria, the existence of which is a condition for the possibility of finding a best solution. (Also, when only one solution can exist, as in assembling a jigsaw puzzle, then any solution found is the only solution and so is necessarily the best.)
Read more about this topic: Trial And Error
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)