A heuristic technique is not guaranteed to be optimal, but which is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal, with a satisfactory solution.

Examples of such:
Trial and error, Rule of thumb, Educated guess, Intuitive judgment, Guesstimate, Profiling, Common sense.

More concrete examples are:

* Sorting and prioritizing is almost always a good heuristic (by Ratios,by values).

* Minimax is a decision rule used for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario.
When dealing with gains, it is referred to as “maximin”—to maximize the minimum gain.

* Local search move from solution to solution in the space of candidate solutions (the search space) by applying local changes, until a maximal/optimal solution is found or a time bound is elapsed, this differs for brute force of every possibility at each step, like the full-space search algorithm.

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