Greedy algorithms are quite successful in some problems, such as Huffman encoding which is used to compress data, or Dijkstra's algorithm, which is used to find the shortest path through a graph.

However, in many problems, a greedy strategy does not produce an optimal solution. For example, in the animation below, the greedy algorithm seeks to find the path with the largest sum. It does this by selecting the largest available number at each step. The greedy algorithm fails to find the largest sum, however, because it makes decisions based only on the information it has at any one step, without regard to the overall problem.