CHAPTER 9 Heuristics

THE FOLLOWING TRICKS and heuristics are not exactly mathematically

precise scientific methods. In fact, some of them sound pretty weird, but as Larry Constantine once remarked, a method is a list of things that tells you what to do next, when you did not know what to do next, and you hope the method at least gets you to a workable solution, if not a good solution.

Let me pick simple programming problems and apply these heuristics as we go along. Consider the “Dance Partner Problem” in which you are given a list of people and their gender. Your task is to pair them into couples.

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Then there is the classic Orders problem: Given ...

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