Optimizing Searches via Rare Events
Andrea Montanari, Riccardo Zecchina · Physical Review Letters · 2002
Randomized search algorithms for hard combinatorial problems exhibit a large variability of performances. We study the different types of rare events which occur in such out-of-equilibrium stochastic processes and we show how they cooperate in determining the final distribution of running times. As a by-product of our analysis we show how search algorithms are optimized by random restarts.