Talk:Heuristic algorithm

The link on "confidence" near the end of the article references a political stub, when the subject is statistical confidence.

Provably?

Well, I really have to admit that I don't know what "provably" (not "probably") means. Perhaps adding a small note to explain what it means, or a link to an article that does, is in order?

--Oskilian

It's the adverb of "provable", which means "there is a proof". Do you not know what a proof is, or did you not understand the flexion? It looks like a perfectly normal word to me, and there's over a million Google hits for it... Unfortunately, I don't know how to avoid this word without losing clarity. --84.59.189.46 19:42, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, I do have to admit I didn't know the flexion and would have probably mistyped it as "proveably" if necessary (And I'm not the alone! google has more than 30000 pages on the word "proveable"!). However, I think that even though the article is properly written, it is not clear for those that don't know the flexion (There's a huge note on the page source explaining that it's supposed to be "provably" and not "probably". I think that it makes my point). To fix this, I've added a link to Proof theory on the word, so people those who don't know the flexion, understand that the word comes from "proof" instead of "probability". But, as a long-term solution, I think that the phrase should be rewritten to something like "finding algorithms with run times that can be proven to be good", which I think is more non-english-native-speakers friendly, without losing any clarity. --Oskilian