Yuri Bykov wins Magic Square Competition

Yuri Bykov has won 1st prize in the International Optimisation Competition. The competition was hosted by SolveIT Software Pty Ltd, a leading provider of enterprise software for advanced planning and scheduling, supply & demand optimisation and predictive modeling. The organizing committee has specified the following purposes of the competition:

• to identify world-class talent in the areas of optimisation
• to promote the benefits of modern heuristic optimisation methods
• to rouse interest amongst individuals of the academic and scholastic communities on the real-world application of these methods.

The prize of the competition was $5000 (AUD).

http://www.solveitsoftware.com/competition.jsp

The challenge was to develop an algorithm, which solves the constrained Magic Square Problem of the largest size within one minute. Yuri's algorithm was based on his invented heuristic: Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing (LAHC) and showed clearly the best performance. It was able to solve the constrained Magic Square Problem several times larger than the first runner-up. Yuri said: "I am happy to bring my contribution into the high research reputation of our Group, our School and our University".