Simulated annealing to find the correct permutation of 20 words I have 20 words. One permutation of these 20 words is the "correct" one. Assume I have a metric to find the correctness of the permutation.

I'm trying to figure out how to use simulated annealing to find the correct permutation of these 20 words. To begin with, I'm not even sure if I understand simulated annealing entirely, so I'll describe an algorithm that I think resembles simulated annealing.

For an arbitrary number (preferably a big number) of times, generate a random permutation and measure how correct it is. If the answer is more correct than any previous attempt, save the score and the sentence. Once we are done iterating, we have found something that it is probably close to the global maximum (the "correct" permutation).

I'm not sure where to go from there. Essentially, I have two questions.


Does that sound like a good approach?
Is my algorithm simulated annealing?
No, that's not simulated annealing.  It's not really even close.

Whether it will be a good enough approach will depend on your metric.  Since you haven't told us what the metric is, it's not really possible to say.  In the worst case, if your metric is sufficiently horrible, you might need to explore all $20!$ permutations.   In any case, usually the only reliable way to find out whether your approach is a good one is to implement and see what happens.  There are few theorems that gives useful provable results about how effective the approach will be; instead, you need to use empirical evaluation.