Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Hill climbing is a graph search algorithm where the current path is extended with a successor node which is closer to the solution than the end of the current path. In simple hill climbing, the first closer node is chosen whereas in steepest ascent hill climbing all successors are compared and the closest to the solution is chosen. Both forms fail if there is no closer node. This may happen if there are local maxima in the search space which are not solutions. Steepest ascent hill climbing is similar to best first search but the latter tries all possible extensions of the current path in order whereas steepest ascent only tries one. This article was originally based on material from FOLDOC, used with permission. Update as needed. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.