heuristics

Today I read that there is a software called WinCalibra (scroll a bit down) which can take a text file with properties as input. This program can then optimize the input properties based on the output values of your algorithm. See this paper or the user documentation for more information (see link above; sadly doc is a zipped exe). Do you know other software which can do the same which runs under Linux? (preferable Open Source) EDIT : Since I need this for a java application: should I invest my research in java libraries like gaul or watchmaker ? The problem is that I don't want to roll out my

You have a map of square tiles where you can move in any of the 8 directions. Given that you have function called cost(tile1, tile2) which tells you the cost of moving from one adjacent tile to another, how do you find a heuristic function h(y, goal) that is both admissible and consistent? Can a method for finding the heuristic be generalized given this setting, or would it be vary differently depending on the cost function? Amit's tutorial is one of the best I've seen on A* (Amit's page) . You should find some very useful hint about heuristics on this page . Here is the quote about your

Everyone knows, if you want to thread emails you use Jamie Zawinski's algorithm . But it's a new century, and there's a new messaging service. What's the best algorithm for threading status updates posted on Twitter? Things I'd definitely like it to cope with: The easy part: using in_reply_to_status_id , in_reply_to_user_id and in_reply_to_screen_name . (Incidentally, finding proper documentation of these values would be useful in itself! Such documentation isn't obviously linked to from here , for example.) Good heuristics for inferring a "reply" relationship from messages that mention a user

I need some help finding a good heuristic for the following problem: You are given an R -by- C grid and a six-sided die. Let start and end be two distinct cells on this grid. Find a path from start to end such that the sum of the faces of the die looking up, as the die is turning along the path, is minimal. The starting orientation of the die is the following (the "2" is facing south): The way I modeled this problem is by considering the value of the die's face as the cost of an edge in a graph. The graph's vertices are of the form (row, col, die) (i.e, a position in the grid and the current

I know there are some scheduling problems out there that are NP-hard/NP-complete ... however, none of them are stated in such a way to show this situation is also NP. If you have a set of tasks constrained to a startAfter , startBy , and duration all trying to use a single resource ... can you resolve a schedule or identify that it cannot be resolved without an exhaustive search? If the answer is "sorry pal, but this is NP-complete" what would be the best heuristic(s?) to use and are there ways to decrease the time it takes to a) resolve a schedule and b) to identify an unresolvable schedule.

Any consistent heuristic is also admissible. But when is a heuristic admissible but not consistent (monotone)? Please provide an example in which this is the case. As Russel and Norvig point out in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the most commonly used AI textbook) it is challenging to come up with a heuristic that is admissible but not consistent. Obviously, you can select values for nodes in a graph such that the heuristic they represent is admissible but not consistent. This paper by Felner et al has a nice example of the two ways that this is possible, but it's a little dense,