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?
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 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
