ThRaSH Seminar Autumn 2026

Randomized search heuristics such as stochastic gradient methods, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, stochastic neural networks for optimization, ant colony and swarm optimization, and the cross-entropy method are frequently used across many scientific communities. They have been successfully applied in various domains, both for combinatorial and numerical optimization. Despite their success in practice, proving that such algorithms satisfy certain performance guarantees is still a difficult and widely open problem.

The mission of the Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics (ThRaSH) seminar series is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics, in particular of their computational complexity. The aim is to stimulate interactions within the research field and between people from different disciplines working on randomized algorithms. The primary focus is on discussing recent ideas and detecting challenging topics for future work, rather than on the presentation of final results.

Steering Committee