EXCHANGE OF COMMENTS ON CONVERGENCE OF GENERALIZED SIMULATED ANNEALING WITH VARIABLE STEP SIZE WITH APPLICATION TOWARD PARAMETER ESTIMATIONS OF LINEAR AND NONLINEAR MODELS

Sir: In a recent article in this journal, Sutter and Kalivas have suggested that the technique of generalized simulated annealing (GSA) can be modified for good use in fitting data to functions.1The GSA technique was developed to find global minima or maxima associated with response surfaces. These authors show that the addition of a variable step size (designated as VSGSA) to GSA results in improved fitting of two examples previously treated with a simplex optimization by Zupan and Rius.2The present communication is not concerned with response surface methodology. We specifically address the issue of whether VSGSA converges to optimum parameter values in the two examples of data fitting given by Sutter and Kalivas. © 1992, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.