Iteration

Deposit Modelling and Archaeology, Guidance for Mapping Buried Deposits, published by Historic England on 31 January 2020, defines an iterative process as: ‘The process of repeating an action to allow the review of previous findings and conclusions.’

The design process is often considered to be an iterative process, where, at each iteration, there are inputs, there is a design process and then there are outputs. At the end of each iteration, the outputs are reviewed and then the process begins again, repeating until an acceptable solution is reached.

Many computerised processes also adopt iteration to arrive at a solution, such as ‘goal seeking’ in excel spreadsheets, computational fluid dynamics, structural design optimisation and so on. Solutions are tested, then the results used to generate the starting position for the next solution to be tested. Over time, this process will move closer to the optimum solution.

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