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During the last decades many metaheuristics for global numerical optimization have been proposed. Among them, Basin Hopping is very simple and straightforward to implement, although rarely used outside its original Physical Chemistry community. In this work, our aim is to compare Basin Hopping, and two population variants of it, with readily available implementations of the well known metaheuristics Differential Evolution, Particle Swarm Optimization, and Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy. We perform numerical experiments using the IOH profiler environment with the BBOB test function set and two difficult real-world problems. The experiments were carried out in two different but complementary ways: by measuring the performance under a fixed budget of function evaluations and by considering a fixed target value. The general conclusion is that Basin Hopping and its newly introduced population variant are almost as good as Covariance Matrix Adaptation on the synthetic benchmark functions and better than it on the two hard cluster energy minimization problems. Thus, the proposed analyses show that Basin Hopping can be considered a good candidate for global numerical optimization problems along with the more established metaheuristics, especially if one wants to obtain quick and reliable results on an unknown problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a popular method widely used in solving different optimization problems. Unfortunately, in the case of complex multidimensional problems, PSO encounters some troubles associated with the excessive loss of population diversity and exploration ability. This leads to a deterioration in the effectiveness of the method and premature convergence. In order to prevent these inconveniences, in this paper, a learning competitive swarm optimization algorithm (LCSO) based on the particle swarm optimization method and the competition mechanism is proposed. In the first phase of LCSO, the swarm is divided into sub-swarms, each of which can work in parallel. In each sub-swarm, particles participate in the tournament. The participants of the tournament update their knowledge by learning from their competitors. In the second phase, information is exchanged between sub-swarms. The new algorithm was examined on a set of test functions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed LCSO, the test results were compared with those achieved through the competitive swarm optimizer (CSO), comprehensive particle swarm optimizer (CLPSO), PSO, fully informed particle swarm (FIPS), covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) and heterogeneous comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (HCLPSO). The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach enhances the entropy of the particle swarm and improves the search process. Moreover, the LCSO algorithm is statistically and significantly more efficient than the other tested methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]