Almost the first scheme thought of when trying to figure out how to solve some problem by approximation is to try to be as good as possible on as large an area as possible. In other words, try to be very optimum locally and hope that this carries over to the rest of the problem. We shall investigate several ways to accomplish this.

The sections are:

The Greedy Method
Divide and Conquer
Local Improvement
General Techniques for Local Search
Gradient Methods

Historical Notes and References
Problems