"Avoid local maximums"

Explain
1

The zig zen states:

* Avoid local maximums.

but what does this mean exactly?

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I remember @andrewrk talking about this one here:

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Thanks, so basically: “don’t be afraid to abandon the best version of a mediocre solution in order to find a better solution”. Good advice.

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This terminology comes from optimization problems, where ideally you want to find the global maximum (i.e., the best possible solution) in a given space but you may get stuck at a local maximum.

You can think of optimization problems as trying to find the highest point in a unknown landscape. Search algorithms typically start at a given point and move around trying to go uphill at each iteration. Once they reach the top of a hill, they can be sure that they found they highest point in their vicinity (a local maximum) but an even highest hill may exist somewhere else (the global maximum). Furthermore, since they would need to go downhill to continue exploring, they instead get stuck as this local maximum.

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