satisficing

Satisficing is about achieving 'good enough' solutions, rather than necessarily striving for the very best. The term was coined by Simon, Herbert, the political economist and AI pioneer, as a blend between satisfy and suffice. Human reasoning is often driven by satisficing and bounded rationality as real world decisions often have to be made in the absence of complete information and without time or mental capacity to fully reason through all scenarios. Although the memory cacpity of machines can allow greater amonts of lookahead, AI systems are ultimately faced with similar situations and this is one of the reasons for the use of heuristics.