Solving maximum cut problems by simulated annealing

Abstract

This paper gives a straightforward implementation of simulated annealing for solving maximum cut problems and compares its performance to that of some existing heuristic solvers. The formulation used is classical, dating to a 1989 paper of Johnson, Aragon, McGeoch, and Schevon. This implementation uses no structure peculiar to the maximum cut problem, but its low per-iteration cost allows it to find better solutions than were previously known for 40 of the 89 standard maximum cut instances tested within a few minutes of computation.