Simulated Annealing, Live: the demos

From Simulated Annealing, Live at kenreid.co.uk.

The marble and the thermostat

Both marbles propose the same size of random step; the only difference is the acceptance rule. Depth readouts show each marble's best-ever height (lower is better).

The strip is the flight recorder: temperature in amber, the share of uphill proposals being accepted in blue, and in the corner the live Metropolis odds for a typical uphill step.

Four algorithms, one map

Press start, or click any map to add a city.
Simulated annealing
Hill climber
Genetic algorithm
Random search

Changing cities re-deals the map. Cooling speed is how aggressively temperature decays over the race (higher = colder sooner). Mutation is the % chance each GA child gets a random swap. Changes reset the race so it stays fair.

The strip between the chart and the scoreboard is the annealer's telemetry, on the same evaluations axis: the faint amber curve is the planned cooling schedule, the solid amber line is the temperature spent so far (as a % of its starting value), and blue is the share of uphill moves accepted in each stretch.

All four algorithms share one budget currency: tour-length evaluations (200,000 each per race).