Foil 78 The Conventional Simulated Annealing and its Problems for Random Field Ising Models

• What sort of NP complete optimization problems are like the RFIM ?
• Normally in Simulated Annealing, choose sequence bm = 1/Tm increasing m = 0,1,2 .... At each bm, equiliberate system according to weight function Pm = exp (-bm E)
• Monte Carlo gets stuck in local minima (which differ by approximately the square root of the system size from true minima)
• This local minimum problem is particularly severe for RFIM as several very widely separated sharp "almost-global minima"
• Traditional annealing copes with case where local minima clustered around a single global minimum

Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu