Heuristics, rules of thumb, and the 80/20 proposition

The author discusses perspectives in the quest for optimality in design. The author provides a perspective, indicates a new direction for optimization research, and supplies a rationale for the use of heuristics in decision making. The author submits that it pays to ask a softer question in a large category of complex problems. However, the author is not advocating a license to be sloppy and to stop the search for good heuristics. Indeed, the author's intentions are to point out the possibility of quantifying heuristics.<
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