Hello, bonjour, sup braddah, kia ora,
Welcome to the 9th and final homework session
of Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations
from the Physics Department of Ecole Normale Supérieure.
In this week's homework, you will apply by yourself
the method of simulated annealing in two different problems.
In the first part, you will study the problem of
14 up to 50 disks
on the surface of the unit sphere.
The algorithm you will consider will allow you
yo obtain in a few seconds
better results than those obtained by sophisticated methods
that were developed during years and even decades.
In the second part, you will then study one of the classic
and most important problems of combinatorial optimization:
the travelling salesman.
It has many important applications in computer science.
You will see how simulated annealing - a method from statistical mechanics -
gives not optimal yet very good results.
So have fun with the final homework session for this course.