Wikipedia — Metaheuristic

Authoritative reference used to harden the spoke’s “metaphor > mechanism” thesis with an outside critique, and to date the field’s vocabulary. Supports grey-wolf-optimizer, metaheuristic-optimization, and the synthesis open question on metaphor inflation.

What it adds

• Term provenance. Fred Glover coined “metaheuristic” in 1986 (the tabu-search work).
• The Sörensen critique. Many recent metaphor-based methods “hide their lack of novelty behind an elaborate metaphor”; “many of the more recent publications have been of poor quality; flaws include vagueness, lack of conceptual elaboration, poor experiments, and ignorance of previous literature.” This prompted “a research agenda for the standardization of metaheuristics.”
• Axes. Single-solution methods “focus on modifying and improving a single candidate solution” (simulated-annealing, tabu-search) vs. population-based ones that “maintain and improve multiple candidate solutions.”
• NFL. “there can be no metaheuristic that is better than all others for any given problem” (no-free-lunch-theorem).

Tier T2. An independent, authoritative voice for the spoke’s standing suspicion that fresh metaphors add little over shared explore/exploit mechanics.