10114 IUPAC Gold Book - simulated annealing 10.1351/goldbook.10114 10114 current 1 Generic probabilistic meta-heuristic to locate a good approximation to the global optimum of a given function in a large search space, in which there is a slow decrease in the probability of accepting worse solutions as the solution space is explored. The function \(E(\rm{s})\) to be minimized is analogous to the internal energy of the system in that state. The goal is to bring the system, from an arbitrary initial state, to a state with the minimum possible energy. At each step, the heuristic considers some neighbouring state \(s^{\prime}\) of the current state \(s\), and probabilistically decides between moving the system to state \(s^{\prime}\) or staying in state \(s\). These probabilities ultimately lead the system to move to states of lower energy. Typically this step is repeated until the system reaches a state that is good enough for the application, or until a given computation budget has been exhausted. PAC, 2016, 88, 407. 'Vocabulary of concepts and terms in chemometrics (IUPAC Recommendations 2016)' on page 425 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2015-0605) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10114/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10114/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10114/plain Citation: 'simulated annealing' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.10114 The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using. 2026-08-07T13:35:39+00:00