Misplaced Pages

The British Museum algorithm is a general approach to finding a solution by checking all possibilities one by one, beginning with the smallest. The term refers to a conceptual, not a practical, technique where the number of possibilities is enormous.

Newell, Shaw, and Simon called this procedure the British Museum algorithm

"... since it seemed to them as sensible as placing monkeys in front of typewriters in order to reproduce all the books in the British Museum."

See also

• Bogosort
• Branch and bound
• Breadth-first search
• Brute-force search

Sources

 This article incorporates public domain material from Paul E. Black. "British Museum technique". Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. NIST..

References

1. Newell, A.; Shaw, J. C.; Simon, H. A. (1958). "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving". Psychological Review. 65 (3). American Psychological Association: 151–166. doi:10.1037/h0048495.

• Algorithms
• British Museum