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
The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
."
See also
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Bogosort
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Branch and bound
Branch and bound (BB, B&B, or BnB) is a method for solving optimization problems by breaking them down into smaller sub-problems and using a bounding function to eliminate sub-problems that cannot contain the optimal solution.
It is an algorithm ...
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Breadth-first search
Breadth-first search (BFS) is an algorithm for searching a tree data structure for a node that satisfies a given property. It starts at the tree root and explores all nodes at the present depth prior to moving on to the nodes at the next dept ...
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Brute-force search
In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving technique and algorithmic paradigm that consists of Iteration#Computing, systematically checking all possible candida ...
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References
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Algorithms
Algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...