What's Are Heuristics?

Talk Description

What are heuristics?

Heuristics are approaches that we use to solve a problem that is similar to a problem we know how to solve, but not necessarily the same.

Got any examples?

Yeah. I think the most, clear one is doors. First time we come across a door, we don't know how it works. But as we learn how doors work, it becomes easier and easier to understand different kinds of doors.

So different types of handles or sliding doors suddenly become easy to to understand. An example from software development would be CRUD, which I find very useful. Create, read, update, delete, which is basically what ninety percent of our software does. We create posts, we read posts, we update them, and we delete them.

What are the benefits?

I guess the biggest benefit is we don't have to invent the wheel every time, so it becomes easier to solve problems as we add more knowledge about similar problems.

Any pitfalls?

They are models of they aren't the truth, so they are fallible. And, of course, we tend to make a lot of assumptions, and those assumptions might be wrong. Fantastic. So now we know about heuristics.