Thanks for the info to simulated Annealing; first I heard of it.
But my concern is the cost in building production quality trial balloons. I
feel that it will be cheaper to use traditional usability testing techniques
when you explore the design space early on in the process. Once you feel you
I actually took a swing at this (genetic algorithms to do control
panel layout) for my aborted dissertation. I chose control panel
layout because it was a limited design domain: knobs, dials, and so
forth, that couldn't particularly morph.
The problems I ran into were:
1. representing the
A great discussion appears to be happening under the original topic. I wanted
to further focus it into something I have been thinking a lot about recently.
So I have hijacked it and created this new thread. My apologies to Oleh.
I find all of the applications coming out to do quick real time
I'll take a chance that the following thought hasn't already been expressed
on these threads.
A lot of work has been done in somewhat-numerical realms to avoid getting
stuck in local maxima.
For example, you could throw a whole bunch of trial balloons into a room
with a bumpy ceiling, see
