[mlpack] GSoC 2014 simulated annealing optimizer

[Ryan Curtin]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 09:18:39PM -0500, Zhihao Lou wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
> 
> Thanks for the reply. It's my own fault missing the deadline. I should have
> known better.
> 
> On the other side, would you please give me some instructions on how should
> I start to contribute? Should I started with some branch or the trunk? My
> guess is my code will belong to src/mlpack/core/optimizers/sa, and the
> interface should closely resembles those existing optimizers. But what's
> the proper way to get information about the problem being optimized, like
> the number of dimension, or the range of each parameters? I can always get
> these as parameters of the constructor, but it is better to get these
> directly from the function itself, if that's possible.

Hi Zhihao,

You can take a look at the other optimizers present in
src/mlpack/core/optimizers/ (in trunk) to get an idea of how these
questions are currently handled, and to get an idea of the interface the
simulated annealing implementation should implement.  The other
optimizers generally get the size of the problem from the
GetInitialPoint() method.

Thanks,

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "Exterminate all rational thought."
ryan at ratml.org |   - Bill Lee