Simulated Annealing

Simulated Annealing (SA) is a smart (meta)-heuristic for Optimization. Given a cost function in a large search space, SA replaces the current solution by a random "nearby" solution. The nearby solution is chosen with a probability that depends on the difference between the corresponding function values and on a global parameter T (a.k.a the temperature). T is gradually decreased during the process. The current solution changes almost randomly when T is large, but increasingly "downhill" as T goes to zero. The allowance for "uphill" moves saves the method from becoming stuck at local minima.

This approach has some similitude with Physic, where the heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the slow cooling gives them more chances of finding configurations with lower internal energy than the initial one.

Simulated Annealing is also used for many different data mining tasks such as Classification, Clustering, and Web search Ranking.

Here you have the code for Simulated Annealing in C++