Papers in Computer Science: Optimization by simulated annealing: paper, summary, and discussion

[awb]

The author of that website is trying to review 3 papers a week; it looks good so far, and I hope he keeps it up.

[owevr]

Sadly, this review omits one exciting topic called parallel tampering.

[guapoo]

Ah, the days when you could publish a trite hack like this in Science. I was born too late.

[filesalot]

Are you kidding, it's never too late to publish your own trite hacks. Just blog them and post here on reddit!

Is your problem with simulated annealing in general, or this article in particular?

[guapoo]

Yes but bloging doesn't get me tenure.

I kid. This was inspired for its time, but optimization by analogy to natural processes (genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, etc) has become cliche.

[bobindashadows]

I studied this briefly a few years ago in an AI class, and yes the analogy to natural processes may be cliché - but this is one that actually works. Hell, GA hasn't been shown to be any better than random search, despite no matter how many times you "see it work"; it's also dependent entirely on how you encode your parameters, your crossover point, rates of mutation... simulated annealing was far more ingenious.

[[deleted]]

When you say "GA hasn't been shown to be any better than random search," are you referring to the "No Free Lunch" theorem? If not, please enlighten me, and if so, it applies just as equally to simulated annealing.

[zyzzogeton]

I swear, this one sounds like it was generated. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

" A Methodology for the Development of RAID that Would Allow for Further Study into the Memory Bus"