Heuristics, Algorithms, and You
Let’s begin with a short retrospective time travel. Picture yourself as an early elementary school child, pencil in hand and paper before you. You are just learning to regroup in addition and subtraction—what then, respectively, were called carrying and borrowing. At the time, no one labeled these as “algorithms,” but the lessons probably were your introduction to them. You need not have known anything about rationales behind the processes; if you followed them faithfully, you invariably arrived at the “correct” answers and were happy to have done so. However, in contrast to algorithms, you already had learned some fundamental heuristics long before you entered your first classroom. And much of that learning was acquired independently and automatically. For instance, you could have come to believe that grandparents were more likely to buy you a new toy than were mom and dad. You, of course, were not aware of the term “heuristics,” and they ...