A tolerant derivative–free nonmonotone line search technique is proposed and analyzed. Several consecutive increases in the objective function and also non descent directions are admitted for unconstrained minimization. To exemplify the power of this new line search we describe a direct search algorithm in which the directions are chosen randomly. The convergence properties of this random metho...

A visual search has been made of four fields using United Kingdom 1.2m Schmidt Objective Prism plates with a reciprocal dispersion of 1 180 A/mm at HP. Such plate material is ideally suited to searches for emission-line galaxies. We present a catalogue of 53 emission-line objects, which comprises 45 galaxies, where individual HI1 regions are resolved in 16 bright galaxies; 8 are emission li...

The authors define a formal model for information services that incorporates the concept of service similarity. The model places services in metric spaces, and allows for services that have arbitrarily complex inputs and output domains. The authors then address the challenge of service substitution: finding the services most similar to a given service among a group, possibly large, of candidate...

Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods are widely used for solving practical optimization problems, especially in structural mechanics. The general structure of SQP methods is briefly introduced and it is shown how these methods can be adapted to distributed computing. However, SQP methods are sensitive subject to errors in function and gradient evaluations. Typically they break down wi...