optimal

1. 1
   adjective

   Best, most favorable, or most desirable, especially within certain limits or constraints.

   Engineers worked to find the optimal trade-off between fuel economy and power.

   With only two weeks and a small budget, a train trip was the optimal choice.

   Similarbest, ideal, optimum

   Oppositesuboptimal

   Note

   Latin optimus, the word for best, sits inside it, which is why the adjective is not comparable: something is optimal or it is not, and more optimal or most optimal strike careful readers as redundant. Where best can be absolute, optimal usually implies a choice made within limits, such as time, money or a balance between features and price.

2. 2
   adjective

   Of a search algorithm, always returning the best result.

   Breadth-first search is optimal only when every step has the same cost.

   Greedy search is fast, but it is not optimal, since it can settle on a worse path.

   Oppositesuboptimal

   Note

   Search algorithms are judged on two guarantees that are easy to confuse. A complete algorithm is sure to find a solution if one exists; an optimal one guarantees that the solution it returns is the best, usually the lowest-cost path. A*, for instance, is optimal as long as its estimate of the remaining cost never runs too high.

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