How to Use heuristic in a Sentence

heuristic

1 of 2 adjective
  • The four modes are not a strict system of classification, but more of a heuristic tool.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Wired, 23 July 2021
  • One of the most prevalent of these biases is the availability heuristic.
    Elizabeth Tricomi, The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2022
  • One way of thinking, so the model said, is heuristic—a quick and dirty approach to processing information.
    Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 7 Jan. 2014
  • In this study, researchers ran heuristic queries on input gradients.
    Aparna Dhinakaran, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2021
  • Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter.
    WIRED, 7 Nov. 2022
  • This is a type of heuristic, a mental shortcut that humans evolved in order to make quick and mostly accurate judgments about their environment.
    Keith Kloor, Discover Magazine, 24 Jan. 2013
  • For now, this idea of visualizing quantum objects by means of bubbles or elastic balloons is just a fun heuristic exercise.
    Quanta Magazine, 16 Feb. 2017
  • Spontaneous bursts of creativity arise from the heuristic and sometimes nonsensical logic of the human thought.
    Joseph Dussault, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 Dec. 2017
  • On the surface, the results suggest that the general heuristic about passion leading to better outcomes was born out, with those who felt passionately about the three subjects tending to score better in the exams for those subjects.
    Pavel Krapivin, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2023
  • The researchers also examined how the heuristic worked when additional patient health conditions were added.
    Jim Daley, Scientific American, 20 Mar. 2020
  • Selective exposure is similar to something called the availability heuristic, which is thought to also play a significant role in the FCE.
    Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 13 Apr. 2021
  • The study compared the heuristic’s collective mortality rates with those of possible triage scenarios.
    Jim Daley, Scientific American, 20 Mar. 2020
  • Using political trust as a heuristic to form opinions on government surveillance is a smokescreen that distracts us from potential government overreach that can infringe upon the rights of both sides of the aisle.
    Angelica Goetzen, Scientific American, 3 June 2022
  • The do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic targets online trolls and other malicious users who harass, cyberbully or use other antisocial tactics.
    Anastasia Kozyreva, Fortune, 21 Feb. 2023
  • These often either reinforce a certain cognitive bias or a certain heuristic approach.
    Jedidiah Alex Koh, Forbes, 7 Mar. 2022
  • The effect of the availability heuristic on pandemic-era decision-making often manifests as making choices based on individual cases rather than on overall trends.
    Elizabeth Tricomi, The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2022
  • The cybersecurity industry needs to follow this heuristic model.
    Chuck Brooks, Forbes, 12 Apr. 2021
  • Conjectures, questions, intelligent guesses, and heuristic arguments about what is probably true.
    Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2021
  • Just a couple of days before the Times analysis, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published another attempt at developing a heuristic for non-pharmaceutical interventions.
    Adam Rogers, Wired, 8 Dec. 2020
  • Producers, directors, and writers should understand that viewers today are enlisting a decision-making heuristic similar to the one Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes used to determine which suitors deserved her limited supply of contraceptive sponges.
    Daniel H. Pink, The Atlantic, 11 June 2018
  • This approach ignores heuristic algorithms, which don’t have theoretically rigorous proof of their efficiency.
    Christopher Savoie, Forbes, 8 Aug. 2022
  • This kind of heuristic reconstruction comes from the qualitative geological record which gives indications of glaciations and hothouses, but is not really adequate for quantitative reconstructions of global mean temperatures.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 12 Mar. 2018
  • Selective use of heuristic and systematic processing under defense motivation.
    Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 2 Oct. 2012
  • Proponents of some alternative therapies exploit the economy heuristic by offering grand rewards for comparatively little investment.
    Nicholas B. Tiller, Quartz, 6 Aug. 2021
  • These cannily aestheticized, fluidly heuristic strategies help the movie transcend its original impersonal conceptualism to convey the immediacy and the real-world power of political mythology—and attempt a corrective demythologizing in real time.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 17 June 2021
  • The four modes are not a strict system of classification, but more of a heuristic tool.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Wired, 23 July 2021
  • One of the most prevalent of these biases is the availability heuristic.
    Elizabeth Tricomi, The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2022
  • One way of thinking, so the model said, is heuristic—a quick and dirty approach to processing information.
    Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 7 Jan. 2014
  • In this study, researchers ran heuristic queries on input gradients.
    Aparna Dhinakaran, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2021
  • Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter.
    WIRED, 7 Nov. 2022
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heuristic

2 of 2 noun
  • Those heuristics are out the door with a rowing machine, though.
    Jay Willis, GQ, 27 Mar. 2018
  • This is a terrible heuristic if you’re being chased by a bear.
    Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 9 Aug. 2019
  • But for those inclined to use heuristics to determine when to worry, Wittes is very useful.
    Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 11 May 2017
  • Green and Daniels write that this kind of intuitive correction is a heuristic honed over years of practice and constant feedback.
    Keith Law, Wired, 1 May 2020
  • With proofs of the heuristics being hard to come by, mathematicians have adopted more modest goals.
    Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 2 Mar. 2017
  • In our field, heuristics can be used to anticipate and thwart the malfeasance of cybercriminals.
    Ajay Jotwani, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Intuitive decisions can be grounded in heuristics: simple rules of thumb.
    Laura Kutsch, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2019
  • This gameplay provides high-level heuristics and adds human intuition to the algorithm.
    IEEE Spectrum, 22 Oct. 2019
  • Large LLMs may simply be learning heuristics that are out of reach for those with fewer parameters or lower-quality data.
    Stephen Ornes, Quanta Magazine, 16 Mar. 2023
  • As a result, there is good experimental evidence to support the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics.
    Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 2 Mar. 2017
  • Spontaneous bursts of creativity arise from the heuristic and sometimes nonsensical logic of the human thought.
    Joseph Dussault, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 Dec. 2017
  • Even small changes to a vulnerable piece of code can defeat Microsoft's heuristics—the code will be vulnerable to Spectre, but the compiler won't add lfence instructions to protect it.
    Peter Bright, Ars Technica, 14 Feb. 2018
  • Performing well on the NBME’s exams often relies heavily on heuristics.
    Vishal Khetpal, STAT, 20 Mar. 2020
  • Research by behavioral economists like Richard Thaler, the Nobel laureate, found that many people have used simple rules, or heuristics, to guide their behavior in benign ways.
    Jeff Sommer, New York Times, 24 Apr. 2020
  • The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call this the availability heuristic.
    Veronique Greenwood, The Atlantic, 1 Nov. 2017
  • Intel says that heuristics can be developed to figure out the best places in a program to include them but warns that they probably shouldn't be used with every single array bounds test; the loss of speculative execution imposes too high a penalty.
    Peter Bright, Ars Technica, 5 Jan. 2018
  • Search engines … use heuristics to determine the way in which to order—and thereby prioritize—pages.
    Soumen Chakrabarti Et Al., Scientific American, June 1999
  • By adopting imperfect heuristics that lead to some decision mistakes, the brain can free up mental resources for deployment in a broader range of decisions as well as other physiological duties.
    Richard B. McKenzie, WSJ, 15 June 2018
  • These war manifestos are, in short, an exercise in motivated reasoning employing the confirmation bias, the hindsight bias and other cognitive heuristics to justify a predetermined end.
    Michael Shermer, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Research in social psychology also suggests ways of coping with heuristics, confirmation biases and social pressures.
    Adam B. Cohen, Scientific American, 1 July 2018
  • This approach preserves performance, but unfortunately, Microsoft's heuristics are tightly constrained.
    Peter Bright, Ars Technica, 14 Feb. 2018
  • Those heuristics are out the door with a rowing machine, though.
    Jay Willis, GQ, 27 Mar. 2018
  • This is a terrible heuristic if you’re being chased by a bear.
    Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 9 Aug. 2019
  • But for those inclined to use heuristics to determine when to worry, Wittes is very useful.
    Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 11 May 2017
  • Green and Daniels write that this kind of intuitive correction is a heuristic honed over years of practice and constant feedback.
    Keith Law, Wired, 1 May 2020
  • With proofs of the heuristics being hard to come by, mathematicians have adopted more modest goals.
    Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 2 Mar. 2017
  • In our field, heuristics can be used to anticipate and thwart the malfeasance of cybercriminals.
    Ajay Jotwani, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Intuitive decisions can be grounded in heuristics: simple rules of thumb.
    Laura Kutsch, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2019
  • This gameplay provides high-level heuristics and adds human intuition to the algorithm.
    IEEE Spectrum, 22 Oct. 2019
  • Large LLMs may simply be learning heuristics that are out of reach for those with fewer parameters or lower-quality data.
    Stephen Ornes, Quanta Magazine, 16 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'heuristic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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