- Hill climbing
In
computer science , hill climbing is a mathematical optimization technique which belongs to the family of local search. It is relatively simple to implement, making it a popular first choice. Although more advanced algorithms may give better results, in some situations hill climbing works just as well.Hill climbing can be used to solve problems that have many solutions, some of which are better than others. It starts with a random (potentially poor) solution, and iteratively makes small changes to the solution, each time improving it a little. When the algorithm cannot see any improvement anymore, it terminates. Ideally, at that point the current solution is close to optimal, but it is not guaranteed that hill climbing will ever come close to the optimal solution.
For example, hill climbing can be applied to the
traveling salesman problem . It is easy to find a solution that visits all the cities but will be very poor compared to the optimal solution. The algorithm starts with such a solution and makes small improvements to it, such as switching the order in which two cities are visited. Eventually, a much better route is obtained.Hill climbing is used widely in
artificial intelligence , for reaching a goal state from a starting node. Choice of next node and starting node can be varied to give a list of related algorithms.Mathematical description
Hill climbing attempts to maximize (or minimize) a function , where are discrete states. These states are typically represented by vertices in a graph, where edges in the graph encode nearness or similarity of a graph. Hill climbing will follow the graph from vertex to vertex, always locally increasing (or decreasing) the value of , until a
local maximum (orlocal minimum ) is reached. Hill climbing can also operate on a continuous space: in that case, the algorithm is called gradient ascent (orgradient descent if the function is minimized).*.Variants
In simple hill climbing, the first closer node is chosen, whereas in steepest ascent hill climbing all successors are compared and the closest to the solution is chosen. Both forms fail if there is no closer node, which may happen if there are local maxima in the search space which are not solutions. Steepest ascent hill climbing is similar to
best-first search , which tries all possible extensions of the current path instead of only one.Random-restart hill climbing is a
meta-algorithm built on top of the hill climbing algorithm. It is also known as Shotgun hill climbing. It iteratively does hill-climbing, each time with a random initial condition . The best is kept: if a new run of hill climbing produces a better than the stored state, it replaces the stored state.Random-restart hill climbing is a surprisingly effective algorithm in many cases. It turns out that it is often better to spend CPU time exploring the space, than carefully optimizing from an initial condition. Or|date=September 2007
Problems
Local maxima
A problem with hill climbing is that it will find only local maxima. Unless the heuristic is convex, it may not reach a global maximum. Other local search algorithms try to overcome this problem such as
stochastic hill climbing ,random walk s andsimulated annealing . This problem of hill climbing can be solved by using random hill climbing search technique.Ridges
A ridge is a curve in the search place that leads to a maximum, but the orientation of the ridge compared to the available moves that are used to climb is such that each moves will lead to a smaller point. In other words, each point on a ridge looks to the algorithm like a local maximum, even though the point is part of a curve leading to a better optimum.
Plateau
Another problem with hill climbing is that of a plateau, which occurs when we get to a "flat" part of the search space, i.e. we have a path where the heuristics are all very close together. This kind of flatness can cause the algorithm to cease progress and wander aimlessly.
Pseudocode
Hill Climbing Algorithm currentNode = startNode; loop do L = NEIGHBORS(currentNode); nextEval = -INF; nextNode = NULL; for all x in L if (EVAL(x) > nextEval) nextNode = x; nextEval = EVAL(x); if nextEval <= EVAL(currentNode) //Return current node since no better neighbors exist return currentNode; currentNode = nextNode;Contrast
genetic algorithm ;random optimization .ee also
*
gradient descent
*greedy algorithm References
*Russell Norvig 2003| pages=111-114
External links
* [http://paradiseo.gforge.inria.fr/ ParadisEO] is a powerful C++ framework dedicated to the reusable design of metaheuristics, included local search algorithms as the Hill-Climbing, the tabu-search ...
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