Reactive search and intelligent optimization

This book is about learning for problem solving. [...] Human problem solving is strongly connected to learning. Learning takes places when the problem at hand is not well known at the beginning, and its structure becomes more and more clear when more experience with the problem is available. [...] What is critical for men is critical also in many human-developed problem solving strategies. It is not surprising that many methods for solving problems in Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and related areas, follow the search scheme [...] We aim at giving the main principles and at developing some fresh intuition for the approaches. We like mathematics but we also think that hiding the underlying motivations and sources of inspiration takes some color out of the scientific work [...]. On the other hand, pictures and hand-waving can be very dangerous in isolation and we try to avoid these pitfalls by giving also the basic equations when possible, or by at least directing the reader to the bibliographic references for deepening a topic. The point of view of the book is to look at the zoo of different optimization beasts to underline opportunities for learning and self-tuning strategies.