CS205: Building with Artificial Intelligence

The main problem that hill climbing can encounter is that of local maxima. This occurs when the algorithm stops making progress towards an optimal solution; mainly due to the lack of immediate improvement in adjacent states.

Local maxima can be avoided by a variety of methods: Simulated annealing tackles this issue by allowing some steps to be taken which decrease the immediate optimality of the current state. Algorithms such as simulated annealing "can sometimes make changes that make things worse, at least temporarily". This allows for the avoidance of dead ends in the search path.