The British Museum algorithm is a general approach to find a solution by checking all possibilities one by one, beginning with the smallest. The term refers to a conceptual, not a practical, technique where the number of possibilities are enormous.

For instance, one may, in theory, find the smallest program that solves a particular problem in the following way: Generate all possible source codes of length one character. Check each one to see if it solves the problem. (Note: the halting problem

Halting problem

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever...

 makes this check troublesome.) If not, generate and check all programs of two characters, three characters, etc. Conceptually, this finds the smallest program, but in practice it tends to take an unacceptable amount of time (more than the lifetime of the universe, in many instances).

Similar arguments can be made to show that optimizations, theorem proving, language recognition, etc. is possible or impossible.

Newell, Shaw, and Simon
called this procedure the British Museum algorithm

"... since it seemed to them as sensible as placing monkeys in front of typewriters in order to reproduce all the books in the British Museum." http://library.thinkquest.org/C005693/page8.html

See also

• Branch and bound
  Branch and bound
  Branch and bound is a general algorithm for finding optimal solutions of various optimization problems, especially in discrete and combinatorial optimization...
  
  
• Breadth-first search
  Breadth-first search
  In graph theory, breadth-first search is a graph search algorithm that begins at the root node and explores all the neighboring nodes...
  
  
• Brute-force search
  Brute-force search
  In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's...
  
  
• British Museum
  British Museum
  The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
  
  
• Infinite monkey theorem
  Infinite monkey theorem
  The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare....