Heuristics A heuristic is a technique that improves the efficiency of a search process, possibly by sacrificing completeness. They are estimates of distance remaining to the goal .
Heuristics depend on domain knowledge and on rules of thumb to help guide the search.
Heuristic Example Take the network and associated search tree introduced in the section on nets and trees . The network given there might be a representation of underground stations, the path costs representing the time it takes to travel between each station. Guess based Heuristic A heuristic for this may be educated guesses based on past experience. Guessing how long it will takes to reach the goal node from each other node gives a heuristic. However, the guesses do need some basis in accuracy.