[yunruse]

The principle reminds me of a “bifurcation algorithm” I found to bifurcate and explore parameter space in a sort of novel way. It has its drawbacks! But it was fun to tinker with, too.

Effectively, we define some function to map N -> B, where N is the natural integers and B is in [0, 1]. (We can then apply some arbitrary function on B for our actual parameter value). We find the initial values as 0, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.75; that is: the extrema, all halves (1), all missed quarters (2), missed eighths (4), missed sixteenths (8), and so on. I used some binary representation of N to get B; there are probably other ways to do it.

I found this pretty useful at bifurcating a highly dimensional parameter space – it meant that made sure at all times I could get a decently equal view of all points (with bias towards B=0) in expanding detail. It also meant I didn’t have to think about allocation time, which was useful on a somewhat packed (but use-as-needed) compute cluster.

[davrosthedalek]

Sounds a lot like quasi-random low-discrepancy sequences like Sobol or Halton. Very effective tool to accelerate Monte Carlo integrations, which boils down to the effectiveness of exploring the phase space (but you have to make sure that sequences in different dimensions are independent!).