Ergodic Annealing

08/01/2020

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by   Carlo Baldassi, et al.

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Simulated Annealing is the crowning glory of Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for the solution of NP-hard optimization problems in which the cost function is known. Here, by replacing the Metropolis engine of Simulated Annealing with a reinforcement learning variation – that we call Macau Algorithm – we show that the Simulated Annealing heuristic can be very effective also when the cost function is unknown and has to be learned by an artificial agent.