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...

We propose a kind of Bak–Sneppen dynamics as a general optimization technique to treat magnetic systems. The resulting dynamics shows self-organized criticality with power-law scaling of the spatial and temporal correlations. An alternative method of the extremal optimization (EO) is also...

The partitioning of random graphs is investigated numerically using “simulated annealing” and “extremal optimization”. While generally in an NP-hard problem, it is shown that the optimization of the graph partitions is particularly difficult for sparse graphs with average connectivities...