Results about NP-hardness in theoretical computer science make heuristics the only viable option for • Simpler problem
One way of achieving the computational performance gain expected of a heuristic consists in
solving a simpler problem whose solution is also a solution to the initial problem. Such a heuristic
is unable to find all the solutions to the initial problem, but it may find one much faster because
the simple problem is easy to solve.
a variety of complex optimization problems that need to be routinely solved in real-world applications.