This thesis presents an investigation of methods for conducting an efficient look-up in a pictorial “phonebook” (i.e., a facial image database). Although research on efficient “mug-shot search” is under way, little has yet been done to evaluate the effectiveness of various proposed techniques, and much work remains before systems as practical or ubiquitous as phonebooks are attainable. The thes...

This paper deals with completion of partial latin squares L = (lij) of order n with k cyclically generated diagonals (li+t,j+t = lij + t if lij is not empty; with calculations modulo n). There is special emphasis on cyclic completion. Here, we present results for k = 2, . . . , 7 and odd n ≤ 21, and we describe the computational method used (hill-climbing). Noncyclic completion is investigated ...

Computer-chess programs achieve outstanding results at playing chess. However, no existing program can compose adequate chess problems. In this paper, we present a model that is capable of improving the quality of some of the existing chess problems. We have formalized a major part of the knowledge needed for evaluating the quality of chess problems. In the model, we attempt to improve a given ...

This study develops a Genetic Algorithm with TRANSYT Hill-Climbing optimization routine, referred to as GATHIC, and proposes a method for decreasing the search space, referred to as ADESS, to find optimal or near optimal signal timings for area traffic control (ATC). The ADESS with GATHIC model is an algorithm, which solves the ATC problem to optimize signal timings for all signal controlled ju...

Problem statement: Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms have been used in solving a wide range of discrete optimization problems for many years, with well know drawbacks like the computational time and difficulties related to the parameters settings. One of the other issues that open the door for research is the acceptance decision that provides for hill climbing; the standard SA algorithms use ...

A general hill-climbing attack algorithm based on Bayesian adaption is presented. The approach uses the scores provided by the matcher to adapt a global distribution computed from a development set of users, to the local specificities of the client being attacked. The proposed attack is evaluated on a competitive feature-based signature verification system over the 330 users of the MCYT databas...

This paper provides guidelines to design climbers considering a landscape shape under study. In particular, we aim at competing best improvement and first improvement strategies, as well as evaluating the behavior of different neutral move policies. Some conclusions are assessed by an empirical analysis on non-neutral (NK-) and neutral (quantized NK-) landscapes. Experiments show the ability of...

In the context of stochastic search, once regions of high performance are found, having the property that small changes in the candidate solution correspond to searching nearby neighborhoods provides the ability to perform effective local optimization. To achieve this, Gray Codes are often employed for encoding ordinal points or discretized real numbers. In this paper, we present a method to la...

We describe and evaluate the algorithmic techniques that are used in the FF planning system Like the HSP system FF relies on forward state space search using a heuristic that estimates goal distances by ignoring delete lists Unlike HSP s heuristic our method does not assume facts to be independent We introduce a novel search strategy that combines hill climbing with systematic search and we sho...