Dialectic Search

We introduce Hegel and Fichte’s dialectic as a search meta-heuristic for constraint satisfaction and optimization. Dialectic is an appealing mental concept for local search as it tightly integrates and yet clearly marks off of one another the two most important aspects of local search algorithms, search space exploration and exploitation. We believe that this makes dialectic search easy to use for general computer scientists and non-experts in optimization. We illustrate dialectic search, its simplicity and great efficiency on four problems from three different problem domains: constraint satisfaction, continuous optimization, and combinatorial optimization.