Heuristic Programming: Ill Structured Problems

This is a reprint of a chapter that first appeared in 1968 in a collection of papers on operations research [1]. The chapter was written to survey the progress in heuristic processes since an earlier 1968 paper on the same topic [2]. In the current collection, it serves as something of a historical introduction to the SOAR system, which occupied Newell and his students for many years. Even though SOAR did not exist at the time this chapter was written, one finds some of the threads that are later to be drawn together into the construction of SOAR. Newell explores so-called weak methods, which trade power for general applicability.