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\textwidth 5.5in

\address{Saleh Elmohamed\\
	 Northeast Parallel Architectures Center\\
         111 College Place, 3-217 CST\\
         Syracuse University\\
         Syracuse, NY 13244\\ 
         U.S.A.\\
	 \\
         Phone:            (315) 443-9182\\
         FAX: {\hskip 5pt} (315) 443-1973\\
         Email: saleh@npac.syr.edu}

\signature{Saleh Elmohamed}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{
Michael Carter \\
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering\\
5 King's College Road\\
University of Toronto \\
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G8\\ 
Canada \\
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}

\opening{Dear Dr Carter,}

Enclosed is the revised version of our paper for the PATAT'97 conference.
We have elaborated on the description of the mean field annealing and the
rule-based system to address the concerns of the referees. We have also
fixed a mistake in one of the figure captions concerning results for the
expert system, which was pointed out by the third referee. Another point
that was raised was the definition of the sparseness ratio -- this was
already defined in the text.

We have also added some extra text to address the comments of the second 
referee on the use of a good starting point for simulated annealing.
It is true that there is no reason to believe that a good starting
point will affect the quality of the result, as long as the annealing
uses an ideal cooling schedule and an ideal choice of moves that efficiently
explores the search space. However in practice this is not the case, and
there are restrictions on how long the annealing run can take, so that
starting from a good solution can improve the results (as it did in our
case), particularly for very difficult problems.

\closing{Yours sincerely,}

\end{letter}

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