Simulation study of a two-derivative hill climber

A dual-estimation hill climber, using a 3-level msequence perturbation signal, has been simulated on a digital computer, and it has been demonstrated that the hill climber works as predicted theoretically under ideal conditions (i.e. on a quadratic hill without noise). The simulation has also been used to investigate the performance of the hill climber on (a) nonquadratic hills, (b) in the presence of noise and (c) for the case where the system settling time has been taken as too small, and it has been found that the hill climber still performs satisfactorily provided certain precautions are taken.