Abstract
One category of global optimization problems is complicated by being combinatorial in nature, another is by having a large number of local optima. Monte Carlo methods are well-suited to attack such problems. Two such methods are simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. Both are inspired by the natural world. In simulated annealing, the objective plays the role of energy in a thermal process to be minimized. Points of the solution space are selected by a permutation of the last solution tried and a Metropolis acceptance discipline. An annealer is an instance of a time-varying Markov Chain and is not guaranteed to converge unless, by Hajek’s theorem, if an artificially supplied temperature is lowered slowly enough. In genetic algorithms, the objective plays the role of fitness of artificial organisms which are modeled as potential solutions. A “colony” of such organisms is evolved by a permutation process, called mutation, and a melding of two organisms called mating. A genetic algorithm is a regular Markov Chain and has an invariant distribution so that eventually all potential solutions will be tried. These methods are demonstrated by the application to several problems: the Traveling Sales Man problem, the permanent problem, and a function optimization problem.
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Notes
- 1.
Nevertheless very large and complicated TSPs have been solved by state-of-the-art software, ibid.
- 2.
TSP with time windows (TSPTW) is a variant of the TSP in which the salesman must visit a specific city during a given window of time. Instances of the TPSTW can be found at http://myweb.uiowa.edu/bthoa/TSPTWBenchmarkDataSets.htm.
- 3.
For example, it gives the number of perfect matchings in a bipartite graph. This is a graph for which the vertices can be partitioned into two sets A and B such that every edge has one incidence in A and one in B. Figure 3.10 is bipartite. A perfect matching is a matching that covers all vertices of the graph. That is, every vertex of the graph is incident to exactly one edge of the matching. If E is the edge matrix of the graph, with \(e_{ij}\) equal to 1 if there is an edge joining vertex i to vertex j and 0 otherwise, then \(\hbox {perm}(E)\) is equal to the number of perfect matchings in the graph.
- 4.
More accurately, \(\#P-complete\), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_the_permanent.
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Shonkwiler, R.W., Mendivil, F. (2024). Optimization by Monte Carlo Methods. In: Explorations in Monte Carlo Methods. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55964-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55964-8_5
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