Simulated Annealing — Probabilistic Optimization

Simulated annealing is a probabilistic local-search metaheuristic introduced by Kirkpatrick, Gelatt, and Vecchi in 1983. It models the physical annealing process in metallurgy — where a material is heated and then slowly cooled to reach a low-energy crystalline state — and uses this analogy to escape local optima in combinatorial and continuous optimization problems.