The authors of "Numerical Recipes" give in Ch. 10 an implementation of the simulated annealing algorithm that combines the "classical" simulated annealing with the Nelder-Mead downhill simplex method.
What I really like about this algorithm is the way it converges to a classic downhill search as the annealing temperatures reaches 0. However, I have never found any other reference to this algorithm; is it a safe, mature variant of the simulated annealing algorithm (i.e. production-ready) or should it be considered as an experimental idea thrown into the book?