Thread: Two level search

Hi!
This is my first post. I need help.

Local search (hill climbing, for example) search solution space for the best solution. Is there any known combination of two cascade search "engines". First one, inner, search what we really need (we will search for this anyway). And the second search engine search over the results from that inner search, by changing various parameters, maybe even change applied search algorithm of the inner search engine. So the outer search is used as kind of benchmark (but progressively leading to a best combination for a given problem set).

Firstly, i named it 'meta search', but it is already used for something quite different (aggregation of results from many search engines).
Then I have tried 'hyper search', which is used too.

multilevel, cascade... all seem to be used for something else.

As I know, principle I have just described, is not known in the CS. I would appreciate it if someone could either send me a link toward existing principle, or give me a suggestion for naming it.

The IEEE "Computational Intelligence" journal for May 2010 has a buncha articles on "memetic computing" which seems to be a fancy word for using "whatever works" techniques, mostly for searching. For some reason, maybe related to why CSers use "ontology" to mean "category", they chose to use the word "meme" to represent different solution approaches. It does sound more important, doesn't it?

I guess a simple example would be to use a genetic algorithm to find areas of likely interest in a fitness landscape, and then switch to a hill-climb to maximize. Or perhaps modify the genetic parameters significantly to narrow the search.

Thanks. I'll try to look at that journal. Just saw Memetic Computing, Springer's journal.
Also, you are right that genetic algorithm may be used to quick sweep for promising areas. But unfortunately, I am currently stuck with local search engines. Maybe later. I wonder, since there could be such imaginative combinations of neural nets/genetic/fuzzy/search/... why isn't there any generic naming convention.

I would like to find some easy to read survey about those interesting combinations and guidance for their recommended usage. Any advice?

I was surprised to find that it's such a big deal, so I don't know much about it. The wiki page might be the place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_algorithm