computational methods for statistical mechanics [day #2]

The last “tutorial” talk at this ICMS workshop [“at the interface between mathematical statistics and molecular simulation”] was given by Tony Lelièvre on adaptive bias schemes in Langevin algorithms and on the parallel replica algorithm. This was both very interesting because of the potential for connections with my “brand” of MCMC techniques and rather frustrating as I felt the intuition behind the physical concepts like free energy and metastability was almost within my reach! The most manageable time in Tony’s talk was the illustration of the concepts through a mixture posterior example. Example that I need to (re)read further to grasp the general idea. (And maybe the book on Free Energy Computations Tony wrote with Mathias Rousset et Gabriel Stoltz.) A definitely worthwhile talk that I hope will get posted on line by ICMS. The other talks of the day were mostly of a free energy nature, some using optimised bias in the Langevin diffusion (except for Pierre Jacob who presented his non-negative unbiased estimation impossibility result).