Definition
Plain language
Always taking the next small step that looks like an improvement, which can leave you stuck polishing a mediocre idea.
As stated in the literature
A local search procedure that iteratively moves to the best neighboring candidate; greedy variants are prone to local optima and to over-exploiting an early incumbent solution.
Also called: hill climbing, greedy hill-climbing
Why it matters: It is cheap and often works, but it explains why automated search can spend an entire budget refining a mediocre starting idea instead of finding a better one.
For example, someone tuning a recipe by only ever changing one ingredient at a time will perfect their soup but never discover that the dish should have been a stew.
Heard on the show
“Okay — so one agent, one robot, hill-climbing overnight.”Episode 159 — Can a Coding Agent Run Its Own Robot Experiments Overnight, With No Human Resetting the Scene?