Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: The surprising little effectiveness of cooperative algorithms in
  parallel problem solving   Biological and cultural inspired optimization algorithms are nowadays part of
the basic toolkit of a great many research domains. By mimicking processes in
nature and animal societies, these general-purpose search algorithms promise to
deliver optimal or near-optimal solutions using hardly any information on the
optimization problems they are set to tackle. Here we study the performances of
a cultural-inspired algorithm -- the imitative learning search -- as well as of
asexual and sexual variants of evolutionary algorithms in finding the global
maxima of NK-fitness landscapes. The main performance measure is the total
number of agent updates required by the algorithms to find those global maxima
and the baseline performance, which establishes the effectiveness of the
cooperative algorithms, is set by the blind search in which the agents explore
the problem space (binary strings) by flipping bits at random. We find that
even for smooth landscapes that exhibit a single maximum, the evolutionary
algorithms do not perform much better than the blind search due to the
stochastic effects of the genetic roulette. The imitative learning is immune to
this effect thanks to the deterministic choice of the fittest string in the
population, which is used as a model for imitation. The tradeoff is that for
rugged landscapes the imitative learning search is more prone to be trapped in
local maxima than the evolutionary algorithms. In fact, in the case of rugged
landscapes with a mild density of local maxima, the blind search either beats
or matches the cooperative algorithms regardless of whether the task is to find
the global maximum or to find the fittest state within a given runtime.

12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int