Plans for the week of February 23-27

Dear all, since we did not have a regular lecture last week (only lab), this week we will try to catch up what we did not do last week. We will thus extend the lecture to 12pm, starting at 915am as usual.? ?The lecture will be recorded as usual. We will try to wrap up the discussions we did not finish last week on the Fokker-Planck equation, but the main emphasis will be on the optimization part. Thus, the aim is to discuss

Here are the plans with the link to the jupyter-notebook for this week, see https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics2/blob/gh-pages/doc/pub/week6/ipynb/week6.ipynb

Topics.

Finalizing the discussion of the Fokker-Planck equation (whiteboard notes mainly and additional notes at https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics2/blob/gh-pages/doc/pub/week4/pdf/fokkerplanck.pdf

Start discussion? of the optimization process and derivation of equations for the gradients of the energy

Gradient methods:

a. Semi-Newton methods (Broyden's algorithm) and gradient descent

b. Steepest descent and conjugate gradient descent

c. Discussion of codes for VMC calculations

Teaching Material, videos and written material.

Video on the Conjugate Gradient methods

Recommended background literature, by Boyd and Vandenberghe. Their?lecture slides?are very useful (warning, these are some 300 pages). Only the part on gradient descent and steepest descent are relevant. The rest is more background material.

Best wishes,

Aleksander and Morten