ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Beam search

Beam search is like looking for your favorite toy among all the toys in your room while only being able to see a few toys at a time. First, you look at three toys that are closest to you and pick the one that seems closest to what you are looking for. Then, you look at the next three closest toys, keeping the first toy you picked, and choose the one that is closest to what you are looking for. You keep doing this until you have found your favorite toy or until you have looked at all the toys in the room.

In computer language, beam search is a way for a computer program to find the best answer or solution to a problem when there are many possible solutions. The program looks at a few possible solutions at a time and keeps the ones that are the most promising or closest to the correct answer. Then, it looks at a few more possible solutions, keeping the best ones from the previous step, and repeats the process until it finds the best solution. This way, the program doesn't have to look at all possible solutions, which could take too much time or memory.