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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Statistical Physics and Algorithms for Graph Counting Problems

David Gamarnik
Operations Research, MIT Sloan School of Management

The talk will be devoted to recent developments connecting statistical physics and theory of algorithms. We will illustrate this connection using graph countingproblems, for example the problem of counting matchings. Unlike prior algorithms which are based on the Markov chain Monte-Carlo sampling method the new approach leads to algorithms which are deterministic and thus do not require randomization. The new approach builds on the notion of correlation decay in statistical physics in connection with the uniqueness property of Gibbs measures. We will then discuss applications of this method to the problem of computing partition functions for lattice models.

Host: Misha Chertkov, T-4