A problem often considered in Operations Research and Computational Physics is the traveling salesman problem, in which a traveling salesperson has to find the shortest closed tour between a given set of cities touching each city exactly once. The distances between the single nodes are known to...

By mapping the optimization problems to physical systems, the paper presents a general-purpose stochastic optimization method with extremal dynamics. It is built up with the traveling salesman problem (TSP) being a typical NP-complete problem. As self-organized critical processes of extremal...

Using a simple, annealed model, some of the key features of the recently introduced extremal optimization heuristic are demonstrated. In particular, it is shown that the dynamics of local search possesses a generic critical point under the variation of its sole parameter, separating phases of...

Identifying the community structure in a complex network has been addressed in many different ways. In this paper, the simulated annealing strategy is used to maximize the modularity of a network, associating with a dissimilarity-index-based and with a diffusion-distance-based k-means iterative...

The microscopic structural features of porous media directly affect their macroscopic properties (e.g., mechanical, electromagnetic, capillary, and transport properties). As for sandstone, the distributions of the clay and the pore in three-dimensional (3D) space have important effects on its...

This paper is an attempt to assess more precisely the scope of the multifractal approach for textural characterization. We perform a series of numerical experiments to reconstruct black and white images from the multiscale moments of a measure defined by a reference image. The reconstructed...

The aim of this paper is to explain why Statistical Physics can help understanding two related linguistic questions. The first question is how to model first language acquisition by a child. The second question is how language change proceeds in time.

Simulated Annealing has become a standard optimization technique for a wide variety of problems: starting at a random configuration and performing a sequence of moves, the system is optimized using a control parameter which partially allows for accepting a deterioration and therefore for...

For many years, the problem of how to distribute students to the various universities in Germany according to the preferences of the students has remained unsolved. Various approaches, like the centralized method to let a central agency organize the distribution to the various universities or...

Search space smoothing and related heuristic optimization algorithms provide an alternative approach to simulated annealing and its variants: while simulated annealing traverses barriers in the energy landscape at finite temperatures, search space smoothing intends to remove these barriers, so...