Hill Climbers 2

[Aide Broeckel]

Amore sophisticated version of this algorithm adds some randomness into your walk. You start out with lots of randomness and reduce the amount of randomness over time. This gives you a better chance of meandering near the bigger hill before you start your focused, non-random climb.

Another and generally better algorithm has you repeatedly drop yourself in random parts of the terrain, do simple hill climbing, and then after many such attempts step back and decide which of the hills were highest.

Going back to the job candidate, he has the benefit of having a less foggy view of his terrain. He knows (or at least believes) he wants to end up at the top of a different hill than he is presently climbing. He can see that higher hill from where he stands.

But the lure of the current hill is strong. There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one. He ends up falling for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.

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Returning to El Cap felt like coming home, I realized as I headed up the wall on my first attempt to free the Nose, in 1993. Some twenty years had passed since my first view of this grand monolith, when I had come on a camping trip to Yosemite with my family. Later it had been a rite of passage when I struggled my way up the Nose with Mari and Dean in 1979, climbing the route mostly on aid during our three-day ascent. Then, thirteen years later, I had made the ascent with Hans Florine in just over eight hours. Now, at age thirty-three, my mission was to free climb every inch of this legendary three-thousand-foot rock formation.

The Great Roof pitch begins with a corner shaped like an open book with a crack at its center. The rock to either side is smooth, and the width of the crack at times pinches down to a quarter of an inch. The corner rises straight up for about a hundred-feet, but then it begins to tilt to the right, leaning over until it becomes a large roof shaped like a breaking wave of granite. To free climb it, a climber must surf sideways on smooth, featureless rock with his or her fingers jammed into the crack above. This was one of the longest pitches of the entire route and its impressive architecture appeared unrelenting in its continuity. To make matters worse, the intensity of the mid summer heat seemed to radiate from the rock, making our skin ooze with perspiration.

This was the section that John had in mind when he pointed to my small fingers and said they would be my secret weapon. Ironically, my height of 5 foot, 2 inches is often a shortcoming on the most difficult face climbs, where there are inevitably moves with long reaches between holds, but on the Great Roof, it appeared that the tables were turned and perhaps my small size would be an advantage.

After a twenty-minute rest, I started up again feeling surprisingly strong and fluid. But as soon as I began the most difficult series of moves, my timing was off and my body position faltered. I thrust my fingertips into a small opening in the crack just as my right foot popped off the face. In the next instant, I was airborne, then the rope caught my fall and I swung sideways into the corner. I hung on the rope, panting, with two thousand feet of air below my feet, and then I lowered back to Simon.

While I rested, a team of Croatian climbers passed us. They moved quickly, climbing in traditional aid style. Down on the meadows I noticed that the pines were casting long shadows. We had limited energy and daylight left. Either I would make the first free ascent of this pitch on my next try, or we would have to abandon our all free attempt and finish climbing to the top.

While resting at the belay, I looked across the valley at the face of Middle Cathedral. On its mottled wall I noticed a play of shadows form the shape of a heart. I have always noticed the symbols around me, and this heart on stone reminded me of the values that have always been most important in my life and in climbing. My own development as a climber has been an extension of the experiences, passion, and vision of others. For me, free climbing the Great Roof was an opportunity to demonstrate the power of having an open mind and spirit. Though I realized that I could easily fall in my exhausted state, I felt a sense of liberation and strength knowing that this was an effort worth trying with all my heart. I had a strong feeling that this ascent was a part of my destiny and that somehow I could tap into that mysterious source of energy to literally rise to the occasion. I said nothing to Simon of my private thoughts, and when I returned to the roof, I realized that this was the moment of truth.

On my bike, there are several target things that seem innocuous but are hiding a fair bit of weight. For example, I love my titanium King Cages, but I found a Tune carbon cage that shaved just about 20g.

In my mind, for an uphill road effort, nothing can beat the Lightweight Obermayer Evos. Yes, Lightweights are expensive, and there are in fact lighter wheels out there, but the benefits of Lightweight are so much more than just sheer weight. There truly is no other wheelset that delivers the same snap and responsiveness as a Lightweight Obermayer. It's a sensation that you just have to experience to understand (Which is why we're actually preparing a Lightweight demo program. Get in touch to inquire!) and given any choice, there's no other wheelset I'd pick for a race like the OSTT.

Chouca (5.13c) in Buoux, France, a famous testpiece back in the mid-1980s, taught me a lot about dynoing. Most climbers with longer limbs had little trouble making a certain big dyno from one pocket to another without whipping off. For me as a smaller person with shorter limbs, the dyno was technical and powerful. However, my small size also meant that I had less weight to launch and control once I latched the hold, and that was a plus.

The trick for me was to generate enough power to travel upward and over to the side on this extremely overhanging wall. The biggest challenge was controlling the rotational movement of my body and limbs as they flew through the air. I had to coordinate the push-pull timing between my hand and footholds so that my body would arrive in the right position with respect to the hold and the angle of the wall. If I overshot, my body whipped off due to the excess momentum. If I tried to catch the hold before my body traveled to the correct position, I would also whip. When I hit the hold at the ideal moment of my upward trajectory, I had less momentum to control and was finally able to catch the hold. In the case of Chouca, on such overhanging terrain, that meant my arm and body were in a position nearly perpendicular to the wall.

1. The first priority with a big dyno is to make sure your feet are in the best places to generate maximum leverage and power. The bigger the lunge, the higher your feet might need to be. Women may have an advantage here in terms of having the flexibility for high foot placements. Experiment with different foot combos to find what feels best.

In numerical analysis, hill climbing is a mathematical optimization technique which belongs to the family of local search. It is an iterative algorithm that starts with an arbitrary solution to a problem, then attempts to find a better solution by making an incremental change to the solution. If the change produces a better solution, another incremental change is made to the new solution, and so on until no further improvements can be found.

For example, hill climbing can be applied to the travelling salesman problem. It is easy to find an initial solution that visits all the cities but will likely be very poor compared to the optimal solution. The algorithm starts with such a solution and makes small improvements to it, such as switching the order in which two cities are visited. Eventually, a much shorter route is likely to be obtained.

The relative simplicity of the algorithm makes it a popular first choice amongst optimizing algorithms. It is used widely in artificial intelligence, for reaching a goal state from a starting node. Different choices for next nodes and starting nodes are used in related algorithms. Although more advanced algorithms such as simulated annealing or tabu search may give better results, in some situations hill climbing works just as well. Hill climbing can often produce a better result than other algorithms when the amount of time available to perform a search is limited, such as with real-time systems, so long as a small number of increments typically converges on a good solution (the optimal solution or a close approximation). At the other extreme, bubble sort can be viewed as a hill climbing algorithm (every adjacent element exchange decreases the number of disordered element pairs), yet this approach is far from efficient for even modest N, as the number of exchanges required grows quadratically.

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