People love taking shortcuts and are addicted to spotting patterns. These patterns can enable us to get answers in the face of complexity.

To illustrate this I've written a logic puzzle which provides new puzzles every day. After promoting this on my instagram it took two days to reach the same number of views that my blog got over the last three months.

Discovering heuristics is work but it's also fun. You might have noticed, depending on which puzzle is showing today, that once you've spotted a pattern it fills you with a little bit of joy as you move closer to the solution.

Heuristics show up in more places. Loan sharks come-up with guesses that determine if a business should be funded. Startup investors use the latest VC zeitgeist to purchase equity.

Chess

We are taught heuristics. In chess we learn how much each piece is worth; for example a pawn is worth 1, knight 3, rook 5 and queen 9. Using these numbers we can make calculated decisions in order to help analyse trade-offs. These values are made up, but they're an educated guess at the current board state and determine who has the advantage or which move might be favourable.

Chess engines also assign values to pieces. Stockfish assigns pawns 208, knight 781, rook 1276 and the queen 2538. These are probably more in-line with what the pieces are actually worth but we can't get a human to do this maths during a game of blitz chess.

There is another way chess engines assign values to pieces and it can change through-out the game. Using a grid we assign values to the board positions and how much each piece will be worth in that position. As an example, a knight in the centre of the board is worth 3 more points than a knight in the corner. We know this intuitively because the knight will have more attacking opportunities in the centre than in the corner. A chess engine can have more precise numbers for the value of each board position given a large enough set of chess matches.

Other Places

Heuristics show up through-out life as they are synonymous with lessons learnt. However it is important that we assert these rules with some rigor as this is where bias can seep in, as with what might happen in naive underwriting.

We don't have to worry about this with logic puzzles or chess, these are just for the fun of it.