the.com/heuristic

means A practical rule-of-thumb or mental shortcut that gets you to a good-enough answer fast, without the labor of working out the exact solution.

from From Greek 'heuriskein,' meaning 'to find' or 'to discover' — the same root that gave us 'eureka,' supposedly shouted by Archimedes in the bath. It entered English in the 1800s as an adjective for methods of learning or problem-solving by trial, experiment, and self-discovery rather than fixed rules, and later settled into its modern use in psychology and computer science for the mental shortcuts minds and machines use when a perfect answer isn't worth the cost of finding it.