Simulated Annealing and Graph Colouring

Simulated Annealing is a very successful heuristic for various problems in combinatorial optimization. In this paper an application of Simulated Annealing to the 3-coloring problem is considered. In contrast to many good empirical results we will show for a certain class of graphs that the expected first hitting time of a proper coloring, given an arbitrary cooling scheme, is of exponential size. These results are complementary to those in "Nolte, Andreas and Schrader, Rainer (2000) A Note on the Finite Time Behaviour of Simulated Annealing", where the convergence of Simulated Annealing to an optimal solution in exponential time is proved

Coloring in Sublinear Time

We will present an algorithm, based on SA-techniques ..

Coloring in Sublinear Time

We will present an algorithm, based on SA-techniques and a sampling procedure, that colors a given random 3-colorable graph with high probability in sublinear time. This result is the first theoretical justification of many excellent experimental performance results of Simulated Annealing applied to graph coloring problems