The paper discusses ensemble behaviour in the Spiking Neuron Stochastic Diffusion Network, SNSDN, a novel network exploring biologically plausible information processing based on higher order temporal coding. SNSDN was proposed as an alternative solution to the binding problem [1]. SNSDN operation resembles Stochastic Diffusion Search, SDS, a nondeterministic search algorithm able to rapidly lo...

The quality of documentary subject search or search for documents containing specifically coordinated information on a target subject is not always satisfactory. Despite the availability of powerful search engines for information resources on the Internet or special databases, the process remains time-consuming and poorly supported by software and methodologically. This paper describes the soft...

The Pattern self-Assembly Tile set Synthesis (PATS) problem is to determine a set of coloured tiles that self-assemble to implement a given rectangular colour pattern. We give an exhaustive branch-and-bound algorithm to find tile sets of minimum cardinality for the PATS problem. Our algorithm makes use of a search tree in the lattice of partitions of the ambient rectangular grid, and an efficie...

Proteins are the most interesting molecular entities of a living organism and understanding their function is a an important task to treat diseases and synthesize new drugs. It is largely known that the function of a protein is strictly related to its spatial conformation: to tackle this problem, we have proposed a new approach based on the class of pattern search algorithms that are largely us...

The class of generalized pattern search (GPS) algorithms for mixed variable optimization is extended to problems with stochastic objective functions, by augmenting it with ranking and selection (R&S). Asymptotic convergence for the algorithm is established, numerical issues are discussed, and performance of the algorithm is studied on a set of test problems.

Previous analyses of pattern search algorithms for unconstrained and linearly constrained minimization have focused on proving convergence of a subsequence of iterates to a limit point satisfying either directional or first-order necessary conditions for optimality, depending on the smoothness of the objective function in a neighborhood of the limit point. Even though pattern search methods req...

This paper presents a new polygonal approximation method using ant colony search algorithm. The problem is represented by a directed graph such that the objective of the original problem becomes to .nd the shortest closed circuit on the graph under the problem-speci.c constraints. A number of arti.cial ants are distributed on the graph and communicate with one another through the pheromone trai...

Energy is a scarce resource in ad hoc wireless networks and it is of paramount importance to use it efficiently when establishing communication patterns. In this work we study algorithms for computing energy-efficient multicast trees in ad hoc wireless networks. Such algorithms either start with an empty solution which is gradually augmented to a multicast tree (augmentation algorithms) or take...

We examine the local convergence properties of pattern search methods, complementing the previously established global convergence properties for this class of algorithms. We show that the step-length control parameter which appears in the definition of pattern search algorithms provides a reliable asymptotic measure of first-order stationarity. This gives an analytical justification for a trad...