Paper detail

Mixing time and simulated annealing for the stochastic cellular automata

Finding a ground state of a given Hamiltonian of an Ising model on a graph $G=(V,E)$ is an important but hard problem. The standard approach for this kind of problem is the application of algorithms that rely on single-spin-flip Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, such as the simulated annealing based on Glauber or Metropolis dynamics. In this paper, we investigate a particular kind of stochastic cellular automata, in which all spins are updated independently and simultaneously. We prove that (i) if the temperature is fixed sufficiently high, then the mixing time is at most of order $\log|V|$, and that (ii) if the temperature drops in time $n$ as $1/\log n$, then the limiting measure is uniformly distributed over the ground states. We also provide some simulations of the algorithms studied in this paper implemented on a GPU and show their superior performance compared to the conventional simulated annealing.