Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research shows how to implement simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman Problem (find the best ordering of a set of discrete items). The goal of a combinatorial ...
Mathematics of Operations Research, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Aug., 2000), pp. 476-484 (9 pages) Simulated Annealing has proven to be a very successful heuristic for various combinatorial optimization problems.
In computer science, normally we care about asymptotic speedup: We care about, “What is your running time as a function of the size of the problem? Does it grow linearly? Does it grow quadratically?” ...