Binary descriptors of image patches provide processing speed advantages and require less storage than methods that encode the patch appearance with a vector of real numbers. We provide evidence that, despite its simplicity, a stochastic hill climbing descriptor construction process defeats recently proposed alternatives on a standard discriminative power benchmark. The method is easy to impleme...

In my youth I used to wander in the mountains. I would gain a "feel" of the terrain and gradually build up a reliable intuition of how to get from here to there and back again. Always, on these expeditions, I would discover special places a tiny area, the only one, where fairy slippers grew; a pool in a rushing stream that was deep enough to swim in. Invariably I would find myself excitedly cli...

In this paper, we generalize the models used by MacKay [1] in his analysis of evolutionary strategies that are based on sexual, rather than asexual, reproduction methods. This analysis can contribute to the understanding of the relative power of genetic algorithms over search methods based upon stochastic hill-climbing, e.g. [2], [3].

This paper describes the meta-level control system of a program (Dominic) for parametric design of mechanical components by iterative redesign. We view parametric design as search, and thus Dominic is a hill climbing algorithm. However, from experience with Dominic we concluded that modeling engineering design as hill climbing has several limitations. Therefore, a need for meta-level control kn...

For this thesis, different algorithms were created to solve the problem of Jop Shop Scheduling with a number of constraints. More specifically, the setting of a (simplified) car workshop was used: the algorithms had to assign all tasks of one day to the mechanics, taking into account minimum and maximum finish times of tasks and mechanics, the use of bridges, qualifications and the delivery and...

no unique method has been so far specified for determining the number of neurons in hidden layers of multi-layer perceptron (mlp) neural networks used for prediction. the present research is intended to optimize the number of neurons using two meta-heuristic procedures namely genetic and hill climbing algorithms. the data used in the present research for prediction are consumption data of water...

Many learning tasks involve searching through a discrete space of performance elements, seeking an element whose future utility is expected to be high. As the task of nding the global optimum is often intractable, many practical learning systems use simple forms of hill-climbing to nd a locally optimal element. However, hill-climbing can be complicated by the fact that the utility value of a pe...