Simulated annealing is well suited for problems where:

1. The number of variables, and thus possible states, is very large. This makes exhaustive search infeasible.

2. There is ``frustration'' : it is not possible to optimize all cost measures simultaneously.

3. Significant improvements from a random starting position are possible.

4. There are many good near-optimal solutions.

5. Hill-climbing is likely to get stuck on local maxima.

Computation is proportional to N or a small power of N , while finding the exact optimum is often NP-complete.

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