Escaping Local Optima

Abstract

We've discussed a few traditional problem-solving strategies. Some of them guarantee finding the global solution, others don't, but they all share a common pattern. Either they guarantee discovering the global solution, but are too expensive (i.e., too time consuming) for solving typical real-world problems, or else they have a tendency of ``getting stuck'' in local optima. Since there is almost no chance to speed up algorithms that guarantee finding the global solution, i.e., there is almost no chance of finding polynomial-time algorithms for most real problems (as they tend to be NP-hard), the other remaining option aims at designing algorithms that are capable of escaping local optima.