For a problem I’m working on I got stuck onto the classical situation of local maximum. After trying to work around the problem in several more or less creative ways, I thought of the simulated annealing algorithm. Considering it’s been a while since I last saw it I tried to search for it on the web and surprisingly there is not much stuff about it, and the few bits I found are often contraddictory. After quite a lot of digging I decided to write about it here. As a warning I should probably say that there will be digging into some basic statistic and complexity analysis, as well as a quick formal introduction to the problem of the knapsack. You should be able to follow even if you don’t know nothing about those topics, but having some foundations in these areas would be of great help.
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A couple of days ago I finally had my Google Wave sandbox account. Given that I just finished developing my very first robot, I thought I’d share some impressions on the whole thing. From the user-side, things are far from being ready. Some important features are still missing, just to name one you can’t remove user from a wave once they joined (or, alternatively, there’s no way to ignore a wave). Indeed, given that I joined several waves to try other people applications, I’m getting continuous notifications. But anyway, the whole thing is to me like a great development playground where I can make all the sorts of experiments.
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