6,607 research outputs found
An Overview of Polynomially Computable Characteristics of Special Interval Matrices
It is well known that many problems in interval computation are intractable,
which restricts our attempts to solve large problems in reasonable time. This
does not mean, however, that all problems are computationally hard. Identifying
polynomially solvable classes thus belongs to important current trends. The
purpose of this paper is to review some of such classes. In particular, we
focus on several special interval matrices and investigate their convenient
properties. We consider tridiagonal matrices, {M,H,P,B}-matrices, inverse
M-matrices, inverse nonnegative matrices, nonnegative matrices, totally
positive matrices and some others. We focus in particular on computing the
range of the determinant, eigenvalues, singular values, and selected norms.
Whenever possible, we state also formulae for determining the inverse matrix
and the hull of the solution set of an interval system of linear equations. We
survey not only the known facts, but we present some new views as well
Practical Volume Estimation by a New Annealing Schedule for Cooling Convex Bodies
We study the problem of estimating the volume of convex polytopes, focusing
on H- and V-polytopes, as well as zonotopes. Although a lot of effort is
devoted to practical algorithms for H-polytopes there is no such method for the
latter two representations. We propose a new, practical algorithm for all
representations, which is faster than existing methods. It relies on
Hit-and-Run sampling, and combines a new simulated annealing method with the
Multiphase Monte Carlo (MMC) approach. Our method introduces the following key
features to make it adaptive: (a) It defines a sequence of convex bodies in MMC
by introducing a new annealing schedule, whose length is shorter than in
previous methods with high probability, and the need of computing an enclosing
and an inscribed ball is removed; (b) It exploits statistical properties in
rejection-sampling and proposes a better empirical convergence criterion for
specifying each step; (c) For zonotopes, it may use a sequence of convex bodies
for MMC different than balls, where the chosen body adapts to the input. We
offer an open-source, optimized C++ implementation, and analyze its performance
to show that it outperforms state-of-the-art software for H-polytopes by
Cousins-Vempala (2016) and Emiris-Fisikopoulos (2018), while it undertakes
volume computations that were intractable until now, as it is the first
polynomial-time, practical method for V-polytopes and zonotopes that scales to
high dimensions (currently 100). We further focus on zonotopes, and
characterize them by their order (number of generators over dimension), because
this largely determines sampling complexity. We analyze a related application,
where we evaluate methods of zonotope approximation in engineering.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, 3 table
Anderson localization casts clouds over adiabatic quantum optimization
Understanding NP-complete problems is a central topic in computer science.
This is why adiabatic quantum optimization has attracted so much attention, as
it provided a new approach to tackle NP-complete problems using a quantum
computer. The efficiency of this approach is limited by small spectral gaps
between the ground and excited states of the quantum computer's Hamiltonian. We
show that the statistics of the gaps can be analyzed in a novel way, borrowed
from the study of quantum disordered systems in statistical mechanics. It turns
out that due to a phenomenon similar to Anderson localization, exponentially
small gaps appear close to the end of the adiabatic algorithm for large random
instances of NP-complete problems. This implies that unfortunately, adiabatic
quantum optimization fails: the system gets trapped in one of the numerous
local minima.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
Three Puzzles on Mathematics, Computation, and Games
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving
mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first
puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear
programming. The second puzzle is about errors made when votes are counted
during elections. The third puzzle is: are quantum computers possible?Comment: ICM 2018 plenary lecture, Rio de Janeiro, 36 pages, 7 Figure
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