Several techniques allow you to optimize things that are too hard to search exhaustively, and we’ve talked about simulated annealing and genetic algorithms before.

Simulating antennas, however, is much harder. [Rosrislav] has been experimenting with using simulated annealing to iterate antenna designs, and he shares his progress in a recent blog post.

In simulated annealing, the temperature value starts out large, such as 1000000.0 and then is reduced slowly on each iteration. Early in the algorithm, when temperature is large, accept_p will be ...