Finding largest small polygons with GloptiPoly

A small polygon is a convex polygon of unit diameter. We are interested in small polygons which have the largest area for a given number of vertices $n$. Many instances are already solved in the literature, namely for all odd $n$, and for $n=4, 6$ and 8. Thus, for even $n\geq 10$, instances of this problem remain open. Finding those largest small polygons can be formulated as nonconvex quadratic programming problems which can challenge state-of-the-art global optimization algorithms. We show that a recently developed technique for global polynomial optimization, based on a semidefinite programming approach to the generalized problem of moments and implemented in the public-domain Matlab package GloptiPoly, can successfully find largest small polygons for $n=10$ and $n=12$. Therefore this significantly improves existing results in the domain. When coupled with accurate convex conic solvers, GloptiPoly can provide numerical guarantees of global optimality, as well as rigorous guarantees relying on interval arithmetic

GloptiPoly 3: moments, optimization and semidefinite programming

We describe a major update of our Matlab freeware GloptiPoly for parsing generalized problems of moments and solving them numerically with semidefinite programming

Convergence analysis of a Lasserre hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial minimization on the sphere

We study the convergence rate of a hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial minimization problems, proposed by Lasserre [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864-885], for the special case when the feasible set is the unit (hyper)sphere. The upper bound at level r of the hierarchy is defined as the minimal expected value of the polynomial over all probability distributions on the sphere, when the probability density function is a sum-of-squares polynomial of degree at most 2r with respect to the surface measure. We show that the exact rate of convergence is Theta(1/r^2), and explore the implications for the related rate of convergence for the generalized problem of moments on the sphere.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure