Middleton A Alan
Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244, USA.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 May;69(5 Pt 2):055701. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.69.055701. Epub 2004 May 14.
A version of the extremal optimization (EO) algorithm introduced by Boettcher and Percus is tested on two- and three-dimensional spin glasses with Gaussian disorder. EO preferentially flips spins that are locally "unfit"; the variant introduced here reduces the probability of flipping previously selected spins. Relative to EO, this adaptive algorithm finds exact ground states with a speedup of order 10(4) (10(2) ) for 16(2) - (8(3) -) spin samples. This speedup increases rapidly with system size, making this heuristic a useful tool in the study of materials with quenched disorder.