Zero-temperature scaling and simulated annealing

Simulated annealing with a more complicated set of moves than single-spin flips is applied to the one-dimensional Ising spin glass. The explicit connection between the residual entropy at T = 0 in the simulated annealing and the number of metastable states, found previously for single-spin flips, is shown to be also true for these more complicated moves. This result together with a zero-temperature scaling argument is used to derive the degree of improvement that the inclusion of more complicated moves can produce. The results are in accord with the observations made for a number of problems in combinatorial optimization. J. Physique 48 (1987) 1255-1263 AOJT 1987, Classification Physics Abstracts 05.50 75.10M