In applied mathematics, Basin-hopping is a

global optimization Global optimization is a branch of operations research, applied mathematics, and numerical analysis that attempts to find the global minimum or maximum of a function or a set of functions on a given set. It is usually described as a minimization ...

technique that iterates by performing random perturbation of coordinates, performing local optimization, and accepting or rejecting new coordinates based on a minimized function value. The algorithm was described in 1997 by

David J. Wales David John Wales One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 1963) is a professor of chemical physics in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Education Wales ...

and Jonathan Doye. It is a particularly useful algorithm for global optimization in very high-dimensional landscapes, such as finding the minimum energy structure for molecules. The method is inspired from Monte-Carlo Minimization first suggested by Li and Scheraga.

References

Optimization algorithms and methods Randomized algorithms {{applied-math-stub