Hey guys, do you feel recursive backtracking is a form of brute force or do you see it as something more clever and pretty?

No its even faster than a brute force solution as you are not testing every possible input. However, you should only use it when your problem is one that can have a very quick test that determines whether your problem can be be completed to a correct solution. I think it can only be the same as brute force or even slower when you use it wrongly.

Theres a concept i read about that has to do with this but i really cant remember its name, would update if i remember.

Its neither brute force or heuristic, its in between,sort of a metaheuristic. Like Fayimora said, its efficiency depends on you coming up with a test the quickly determines if a path can lead to a solution.

in backtracking, there's a quick test or partial test to check if the path can lead to an acceptable solution but in brute forcing, all tests are treated as complete not incremental.

They are not the same. brute forcing will take so much longer where backtracking will work but i don't believe backtracking will work in cases that require a brute force approach (situations where there's no pre-determinable path to the solution).

Okay. Thanks guys. I think if I get you right, the thin line is draw in your way of use of backtracking. If used improperly, it will take processor time and memory footprint just like brute force. I'll post a practical problem here and we'll try to use both techniques and analyse them. Once again, thanks.