Published June 1996 | Version Campus-Access Only
Journal Article

Two measures of difficulty

Creators

Abstract

The paper constructs two measures of difficulty for functions defined over binary strings. The first of these measures,cover size, captures the difficulty of solving a problem in parallel. The second measure,ascent size, captures the difficulty of solving a problem sequentially. We show how these measures can help us to better understand the performance of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, two widely used search algorithms. We also show how disparities in these two measures may shed light on the organizational structure of firms.

Additional Information

© 1996 Springer-Verlag. This paper has benefited from comments by seminar participants the NBER\CEME Decentralization Conference, UC-Irvine, and UC-San Diego. The author would like to thank Stan Reiter for his guidance and for his many suggestions in helping refine the concepts developed in this paper. Art Devany, Gordon Green, Jim Jordan, Nick Vriend, and an anonymous referee made helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Identifiers

Eprint ID
80647
DOI
10.1007/BF01211821
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20170821-135134067

Dates

Created
2017-08-21
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Updated
2021-11-15
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