We have used CGO to improve known values of the minimum potential for Thomson's problem for many numbers of charges from 66 to 100. For the office assignment problem CGO found significantly lower results than SA. We think that CGO will be applicable to a wide class of optimization problems, especially those with long range interactions.
We thank Bill Rugolsky, Richard Stong, Berni Alder, Tom Slezak, Nick Gentile, and Morris Brody for helpful discussions. Two of the authors, (ELA and ERR) were partially supported by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. This work was performed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the auspices of the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract W--7405--Eng--48.