What is the Difference between a Heuristic and an Algorithm?

Question

What is the Difference between a Heuristic and an Algorithm?

Answer 1

Actually I don't think that there is a lot in common between them. Some algorithm use heuristics in their logic (often to make fewer calculations or get faster results). Usually heuristics are used in the so called greedy algorithms.

Heuristics is some "knowledge" that we assume is good to use in order to get the best choice in our algorithm (when a choice should be taken). For example ... a heuristics in chess could be (always take the opponents' queen if you can, since you know this is the stronger figure). Heuristics do not guarantee you that will lead you to the correct answer, but (if the assumptions is correct) often get answer which are close to the best in much shorter time.

Answer 2

• An algorithm is typically deterministic and proven to yield an optimal result
• A heuristic has no proof of correctness, often involves random elements, and may not yield optimal results.

Many problems for which no efficient algorithm to find an optimal solution is known have heuristic approaches that yield near-optimal results very quickly.

There are some overlaps: "genetic algorithms" is an accepted term, but strictly speaking, those are heuristics, not algorithms.

Answer 3

Heuristic, in a nutshell is an "Educated guess". Wikipedia explains it nicely. At the end, a "general acceptance" method is taken as an optimal solution to the specified problem.

Heuristic is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or 'optimal solution'. Heuristics are "rules of thumb", educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.

In more precise terms, heuristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.

While an algorithm is a method containing finite set of instructions used to solving a problem. The method has been proven mathematically or scientifically to work for the problem. There are formal methods and proofs.

Heuristic algorithm is an algorithm that is able to produce an acceptable solution to a problem in many practical scenarios, in the fashion of a general heuristic, but for which there is no formal proof of its correctness.

Answer 4

An Algorithm is a clearly defined set of instructions to solve a problem, Heuristics involve utilising an approach of learning and discovery to reach a solution.

So, if you know how to solve a problem then use an algorithm. If you need to develop a solution then it's heuristics.

Answer 5

A heuristic is usually an optimization or a strategy that usually provides a good enough answer, but not always and rarely the best answer. For example, if you were to solve the traveling salesman problem with brute force, discarding a partial solution once its cost exceeds that of the current best solution is a heuristic: sometimes it helps, other times it doesn't, and it definitely doesn't improve the theoretical (big-oh notation) run time of the algorithm

Answer 6

Heuristics are algorithms, so in that sense there is none, however, heuristics take a 'guess' approach to problem solving, yielding a 'good enough' answer, rather than finding a 'best possible' solution.

A good example is where you have a very hard (read NP-complete) problem you want a solution for but don't have the time to arrive to it, so have to use a good enough solution based on a heuristic algorithm, such as finding a solution to a travelling salesman problem using a genetic algorithm.

Answer 7

Algorithm is a sequence of some operations that given an input computes something (a function) and outputs a result.

Algorithm may yield an exact or approximate values.

It also may compute a random value that is with high probability close to the exact value.

A heuristic algorithm uses some insight on input values and computes not exact value (but may be close to optimal). In some special cases, heuristic can find exact solution.

Answer 8

An algorithm is the description of an automated solution to a problem. What the algorithm does is precisely defined. The solution could or could not be the best possible one but you know from the start what kind of result you will get. You implement the algorithm using some programming language to get (a part of) a program.

Now, some problems are hard and you may not be able to get an acceptable solution in an acceptable time. In such cases you often can get a not too bad solution much faster, by applying some arbitrary choices (educated guesses): that's a heuristic.

A heuristic is still a kind of an algorithm, but one that will not explore all possible states of the problem, or will begin by exploring the most likely ones.

Typical examples are from games. When writing a chess game program you could imagine trying every possible move at some depth level and applying some evaluation function to the board. A heuristic would exclude full branches that begin with obviously bad moves.

In some cases you're not searching for the best solution, but for any solution fitting some constraint. A good heuristic would help to find a solution in a short time, but may also fail to find any if the only solutions are in the states it chose not to try.