Adjective

(en adjective)

of, or relating to determinism

(mathematics, of a Turing machine) having at most one instruction associated with any given internal state

(physics, of a system) Having exactly predictable time evolution.

(computing, of an algorithm) Having each state depend only on the immediately previous state, as opposed to having some states depend on backtracking where there may be multiple possible next actions and no way to choose between them except by trying each one and backtracking upon failure.

Adjective

(en adjective)

Relating to general strategies or methods for solving problems.

(computing, of a method or algorithm) that solves a problem more quickly but is not certain to arrive at an optimal solution.

* {{quote-book, year=2002, author=Te Chiang Hu, Man-tak Shing, title=Combinatorial Algorithms citation

, passage=If a heuristic algorithm works for most of the input data or its maximum percentage error is tolerable, we may prefer the heuristic algorithm to an optimum algorithm that requires a long time.}}