It would seem yes?... unless I'm not seeing a deeper connection. Simulated annealing is a technique--like gradient descent--for finding the optimum of some mod

It would seem yes?... unless I'm not seeing a deeper connection. Simulated annealing is a technique--like gradient descent--for finding the optimum of some model. Surrogate modeling on the other hand is the creation of a simpler approximation to a more complicated model. They would seem to me to be quite different things, the former being an optimization technique and the latter being a modeling one.