> But what I understand is that while simulated annealing is good for many things, it hasn't shown itself to be best for anything
That's kind of the nature of the beast, though. Approaches like Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms are appropriate for situations in which you have no good heuristic for pruning a search tree. They're almost always going to be last resort approaches, but at least in the case of SA they generally approximate quickly enough to provide useful results.
That's kind of the nature of the beast, though. Approaches like Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms are appropriate for situations in which you have no good heuristic for pruning a search tree. They're almost always going to be last resort approaches, but at least in the case of SA they generally approximate quickly enough to provide useful results.