On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Thomas Savitsky <tjsavit...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all, > > I've noticed that the function find_minimum_on_interval makes no attempt to > find "the" minimum on the interval as the documentation implies, but rather > "a local" minimum. I imagine this may be a source of confusion for other > new users as well. Rather than treating this as a bug, may I suggest > changing the documentation for this function to reflect that it only finds a > local minimum and adding an additional function which searches for a global > minimum?
+1 Can you provide a few examples for the docstring that illustrate this? William > > I looked into global optimizers, and scipy's anneal is not the answer. It > gives poor results quite often. A better choice would be ASA, located at > http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ingber/#ASA Unfortunately, there are functions > which give this (and other) optimizer problems, such as the Rosenbrock > function: (1-x)^2 + 100 (y - x^2)^2. Nevertheless, a numerical > approximation for a global minimum would benefit sage imo. But if it were > added, how should the end user be informed that the answer given may very > wrong, and significant effort spent tuning options to the optimizer may be > required for a good result? > > -- Thomas Savitsky > > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
