Two measures of difficulty (*)

Scott E. Page
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Scott E. Page: Division of Humanities and Social Sciences 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

Economic Theory, 1996, vol. 8, issue 2, 346 pages

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.

Date: 1996
Note: Received: October 31, 1994; revised version December 7, 1994
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