Simulated Annealing

David,

I have been playing with the Galapagos Simulated Annealing solver for a bit now and I am ready to start messing with the default settings. I found your discussion post on inbreeding and settings for the Genetric Algorithm very helpful.

Could you please provide a brief description of the settings and their domains for Simulated Annealing or atleast verify my following assumptions/guesses.

Temperature (range 0%-100%): Initial temperature. If this were lower then I'm thinking the algorithm starts colder and thus does not make as large permutation jumps and will hit solid sooner.

Cooling: This seems to be a ratio that will affect the rate at which the algorithm cools, with a lower ratio being a quicker cooling algorithm.

Drift Rate: This seems to control variation in sequential generations, where a higher drift rate will create greater variation in the Genome generations.

Currently I am running an SA and it seems that it is taking very small steps every generation. I have a lot of genes and each has a wide domain and the algorithm seems to linger in smaller sub domains of a gene rather than testing its extremes. I am thinking that increasing the Drift Rate from the 25% default could create bigger jumps in Gene variation. Is this true? Or if I let it completely cool, will it eventually hit the extremes of each gene domain?

Galapagos is a lot of fun. Thanks for the tool.

Thanks,

Ben