Brute force

In computer science, Brute Force, sometimes called the Naive Method, is a term used to refer to the most simplest, most intuitive, most spontaneous, and usually most inefficient methods of accomplishing a task.

Before Software engineering, computer programmers used brute force to design a program: understand an objective to be done and just do it. Programmers would just keep picking at a task until it was done. Brute force was fine for the simplest programs in the early era of computing, when programs were not complex and not safety-sensitive/safety-critical.

In the modern era, Software Engineering is used to manage software systems which contain millions of lines of code which poses a problem in terms of efficiency of brute force.

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In a similar topic, algorithms which systematically looks at every possible solution of a problem until a solution is found is a brute force search. There thus becomes a tradeoff -- brute force algorithms are extremely simple to design, however they are terribly inefficient. For example, using algorithms of this nature are usually inefficient when looking at massive amounts of input, such as DNA strands.

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Brute Force was also a computer chess program, designed in the 1970s.