Abstract
We address the question of how one evaluates the usefulness of a heuristic program on a particular input. If theoretical tools do not allow us to decide for every instance whether a particular heuristic is fast enough, might we at least write a simple, fast companion program that makes this decision on some inputs of interest? We call such a companion program a timer for the heuristic. Timers are related to program checkers, as defined by Blum [3], in the following sense: Checkers are companion programs that check the correctness of the output produced by (unproven but bounded-time) programs on particular instances; timers, on the other hand, are companion programs that attempt to bound the running time on particular instances of correct programs whose running times have not been fully analyzed. This paper provides a family of definitions that formalize the notion of a timer and some preliminary results that demonstrate the utility of these definitions.
Most of this work first appeared in an AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Memorandum on December 1, 1994.
Supported in part by an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship and a consulting agreement with AT&T Bell Laboratories.
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Cowen, L., Feigenbaum, J., Kannan, S. (1996). A formal framework for evaluating heuristic programs. In: Meyer, F., Monien, B. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61440-0_165
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61440-0_165
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