Short answers, pulled from the story.
In psychology, a heuristic is a simple, efficient rule, either learned or inculcated by evolutionary processes, that people use to make decisions, form judgments, and solve problems. These rules work well under most circumstances but can lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases in certain situations.
The concept was originally introduced by Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, whose primary research concerned problem solving. Simon argued that people operate within "bounded rationality" and coined the term "satisficing" to describe the tendency to accept solutions that are good enough rather than optimal.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman developed the study of heuristics in human decision-making during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2002, Kahneman and Shane Frederick also proposed the theory of attribute substitution, which holds that heuristics work by unconsciously replacing a complex judgment with a simpler one.
The less-is-more effect is the finding that under genuine uncertainty, simpler heuristics can achieve higher accuracy with lower effort than complex methods. Gerd Gigerenzer's research group identified this effect through formal models of fast and frugal heuristics in the adaptive toolbox.
In legal theory, heuristics are used when case-by-case analysis would be impractical. Examples include the 21-year drinking age and the 20-year patent term in the United States, both of which apply uniform rules across a population rather than tailored assessments of each individual case.
George Polya published his study of heuristics in 1945 in the book How to Solve It. Polya also cited Pappus of Alexandria as an early practitioner of heuristic problem-solving methods, which Pappus approached through analysis and synthesis.