Hill climbing algorithm simple example

Question

I am a little confused with Hill Climbing algorithm. I want to \"run\" the algorithm until i found the first solution in that tree ( \"a\" is initial and h and k are final state

Answer 1

A common way to avoid getting stuck in local maxima with Hill Climbing is to use random restarts. In your example if G is a local maxima, the algorithm would stop there and then pick another random node to restart from. So if J or C were picked (or possibly A, B, or D) you would find the global maxima in H or K. Rinse and repeat enough times and you'll find the global maxima or something close; depending on time/resource limitations and the problem space.

Note that Local Search like Hill Climbing isn't complete and can't guarantee to find the global maxima. The benefit, of course, is that it requires a fraction of the resources. In practice and applied to the right problems, it's a very effective solution.