Taxonomy

The Stochastic Hill Climbing algorithm is a Stochastic Optimization algorithm and is a Local Optimization algorithm (contrasted to Global Optimization). It is a direct search technique, as it does not require derivatives of the search space. Stochastic Hill Climbing is an extension of deterministic hill climbing algorithms such as Simple Hill Climbing (first-best neighbor), Steepest-Ascent Hill Climbing (best neighbor), and a parent of approaches such as Parallel Hill Climbing and Random-Restart Hill Climbing.

Strategy

The strategy of the Stochastic Hill Climbing algorithm is iterate the process of randomly selecting a neighbor for a candidate solution and only accept it if it results in an improvement. The strategy was proposed to address the limitations of deterministic hill climbing techniques that were likely to get stuck in local optima due to their greedy acceptance of neighboring moves.

Implementation

http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/stochastic/stochastic_hill_climbing.rb