I read about the hill climbing algorithms, the simulating annealing algorithm, but I am confused. What is the basic purpose of local search methods?
Hill climbing, Simulated annealing, genetic algorithms are different variants of local search algorithm. Hill Climbing use to find good solution for NP-hard problems. Simulated annealing was first used extensively to solve VLSI layout problems. It has been applied widely to factory scheduling and other large-scale optimization tasks. Genetic algorithm have had a wide-spread impact on optimization problems, such as circuit layout and job-shop scheduling.