Scribd
Upload
123 views14 pages

Local Search Algorithms

The document discusses various local search algorithms used to solve optimization problems. It describes hill-climbing search and its tendency to get stuck in local maxima. Simulated annealing is introduced as a way to occasionally accept downhill moves to escape local maxima. Local beam search tracks multiple states in parallel. Genetic algorithms use crossover and mutation operators on a population of states to evolve solutions. The 8-queens problem is provided as an example problem that local search algorithms can be applied to.

Uploaded by

Shreyas Varadkar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
123 views14 pages

Local Search Algorithms

The document discusses various local search algorithms used to solve optimization problems. It describes hill-climbing search and its tendency to get stuck in local maxima. Simulated annealing is introduced as a way to occasionally accept downhill moves to escape local maxima. Local beam search tracks multiple states in parallel. Genetic algorithms use crossover and mutation operators on a population of states to evolve solutions. The 8-queens problem is provided as an example problem that local search algorithms can be applied to.

Uploaded by

Shreyas Varadkar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 14

Local Search Algorithms

Local Search
• When a goal is found, the path to that goal also
constitutes a solution to the problem.
• In many problems, however, the path to the goal is
irrelevant.
• For example, in the 8- queens problem
• If the path to the goal does not matter, we might
consider a different class of algorithms
• Local search algorithms operate using
• CURRENTSTATE a single current state (rather than
multiple paths) and generally move only to
neighbors of that state.
• the paths followed by the search are not retained
• local search algorithms are not systematic, they have two key
advantages
– they use very little memory usually a constant amount
– they can often find reasonable solutions in large or infinite (continuous)
state spaces for which systematic algorithms are unsuitable.
– local search algorithms are useful for solving pure optimization problems
Hill-climbing search
• It is simply a loop that continually moves in the
direction of increasing value
• It terminates when it reaches a "peak" where no
neighbor has a higher value
• The algorithm does not maintain a search tree, so the
current node data structure need only record the
state and its objective function value.
• Example- 8-Queen
• Hill climbing is sometimes called greedy local s'earch because
it grabs a good neighbor state without thinking ahead about
where to go next.
• Unfortunately, hill climbing often gets stuck for the following
reasons:
– Local maxima: a local maximum is a peak that is higher than each of
its neighboring states, but lower than the global maximum.
– Ridges:Ridges result in a sequence of local maxima that is very
difficult for greedy algorithms to navigate.
– Plateaux: a plateau is an area of the state space landscape where the
evaluation function is flat. It can be a flat local maximum, from which
no uphill exit exists, or a shoulder,from which it is possible to make
progress.
– A hill-climbing search might be unable
to find its way off the plateau.
variants of Hill Climbing
• Stochastic hill climbing chooses at random from
among the uphill moves; the probability of selection
can vary with the steepness of the uphill move.
• First-choice hill climbing implements stochastic hill
climbing by generating successors randomly until
one is generated that is better than the current state.
• Random-restart hill climbing adopts the well known
adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
• The success of hill climbing depends very much on
the shape of the state-space landscape:
Simulated Annealing
• A hill-climbing algorithm never makes downhill" moves
towards states.
• In metallurgy, annealing is the process used to temper or
harden metals and glass by heating them to a high
temperature and then gradually cooling them, thus alllowing
the material to coalesce into a low-energy crystalline state.
• ping-pong ball into the deepest crevice in a bumpy surface
• If we just let the ball roll, it will come to rest at a local
minimum.
• The solution is to start by shaking hard (i.e., at a high
temperature) and then gradually reduce the intensity of the
shaking (i.e., lower the temperature).
• Simulated annealing was first used extensively to solve VLSl
layout problems in the early 1980s.
Simulated annealing
Local beam search
• The local beam search algorithm keeps track of k states rather
than just one.
• It begins with k randomly generated states.
• At each step, all the successors of all k states are generated. If
any one is a goal, the algorithm halts.
• Otherwise, it selects the k best successors from the complete
list and repeats
• In a local beam search, useful information is passed among
the k parallel search threads
• if first state has good successors and k-1 states generates bad.
then all resources of k-1 state are released.
• In its simplest form, local beam search can suffer from
a lack of diversity among the k states
• A variant called stochastic beam search, analogous to
stochastic hill climbing, helps to alleviate this problem
• Instead of choosing the best k from the the pool of
candidate successors, stochastic beam search chooses k
successors at random
• the probability of choosing a given successor being an
increasing function of its value.
Genetic algorithms
• Like beam search, begin with a set of k randomly
generated states called population
• Each state, or individual, is represented as a string
over a finite alphabet.
• Each state or individual is having fitness value.
• Individual is preapered with some encoding Scheme.
Value encoding or binary encoding
• Two operators Crossover and Mutation are used to
reproduce new offsprings
8 queen problem

You might also like