Meaning & use
lookahead
Last updated
The act or capability of examining future input, data, or conditions before deciding how to act on the current one.
See it in a sentence
The compiler uses a one-token lookahead to decide how to parse ambiguous expressions.
Good chess players rely on deep lookahead to anticipate their opponent's strategy.
A note on using this word
The term is especially common in computer science, where lookahead describes how much future data an algorithm inspects before making a decision.
Words with a similar meaning
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
Words with an opposite meaning
hindsight
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