I realize that you mentiond there’s already an optimizer in OOO … but it works so bad. Simply giving totally false solutions that MS Excel solves without a glitch. Pleeease pick up the task again. :-)

Is this a bug?

Sorry I couldn’t respond sooner. Just FYI, I’m no longer maintaining my Solver extension, which means that the development plan that you saw will not be carried out, unfortunately. Since Sun has developed their own Solver functionality, I lost my motivation for continuing with mine. Besides, it’s hard for me to invest time to continue working on Solver due to my other duties.

I’ll still keep that code around since it has some good implementation that I can re-use for other projects, but it will not be developed actively.

http://code.google.com/p/scsolver/wiki/DevelopmentPlan

VERY interesting. I am battling MS Excel solver. I would be very willing of testing your solvers with the problem I am battling (which is FILLED) with local minima – and MS Excel solver jumps right into them (and doesn’t come back out). Your idea to implement Genetic algorithm is just down my alley.

… oh BTW, my math is complex (real and imag numbers).

P.S. For constrained optimization – think about “Golden Section Search” … it has worked well for me in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search

Best regards,
Claus

M.Sc. M. E. – with double-training in numerical optimization (Aalborg University, Denmark + Braunschweig University, Germany).

JimYC