Lecture Notes for CS 512, Algorithm Design
22 March 1999, Exhaustive Search and Heuristics
- intractable problems still need to be solved
- exponential algorithms run on small or average cases
- polynomial algorithms to give non-optimal results - heuristic
algorithms
- heuristic algorithms giving boundedly non-optimal results
- using intractable algorithms
- for small inputs, the algorithm may be fast enough
- backtracking algorithms
- make a guess and see what happens
- on failure backtrack to the most recent guess and try again
- set partition
- branch and bound
- exhaustive search
- using heuristics - rules of thumb
- out of all possible next choices, take the best one - greed
- sometimes greed is optimal - dikjstra's shortest path; prim's or
kruskal's mst algorithm
- sometimes greed is good or bad - knapsack packing
This page last modified on 24 March 2000.