Heuristics

One nice text that I read some days ago about heuristics, that can be found at www.zib.de/groetschel/students/Diplom-Berthold.pdf:

In the sense of this very general and vague definition, we all apply heuristic methods quite frequently. For example, if we want to buy a new PC, we decide on the model to chose and the shop to buy it, after having considered only a small part of the available information. Collecting and evaluating all offers would probably take too much time, such that our PC is already out of fashion, until we are sure, which one is the optimal for us. Instead of, we orientate ourselves on some criteria which seem reasonable to us: maybe we read some test reports, we ask a neighbor who is interested in computers and bought a new one just a month ago. We could also follow the salesman’s advice at our favorite computer shop who hopefully also wants to maximize our benefit and not merely his own profit.