Hint.The “Hint” operator makes use of some feedback provided by the evaluation program. In addition to providing the unity check values, the evaluation program calculates an “ideal” cross-sectional area for each member. This calculation is myopic, in that it does not consider the effect of other size changes. For example, a member that needs to be increased in size if nothing else changes may be fine, or could even be reduced in size, if other members are also reduced in size thus reducing the load due to the structure’ s own weight. For this operator we take the “hint” value for all members, rounding each up to an allowed size if necessary.