Locally Optimal

How optimal is locally optimal?

A local optimum is better than every solution immediately beside it and still worse than the global optimum. You have reached the top of a hill. The chart contains mountains. Congratulations on achieving the highest point available without taking one frightening step in the wrong direction.

Optimisation methods can become trapped there because every nearby move makes the score temporarily worse. Escape may require randomness, a wider search or the professionally catastrophic admission that improvement sometimes begins with a decline in this quarter’s approved number. Most systems prefer the hill. The hill has a dashboard.

Organisations reproduce the error with lanyards and catered workshops. They optimise one team, one quarter or one metric until the surrounding system becomes worse with admirable efficiency. LOCALLY OPTIMAL is both a mathematical condition and the strongest compliment Legal will permit us to print.

Evidence: Local optimum, NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures