Experimental Analysis for the Lennard-Jones Problem Solution

In this paper the problem of determining the atomic cluster configurations that minimize the Lennard-Jones potential energy is approached. Traditional studies are oriented to improve the quality of the solution and practically do not present statistical information to support the efficiency of the reported solution methods. Without this type of evidence the effectiveness of these methods might highly be dependent only on the capacity of the available computing resources. In this work it is proposed to incorporate statistical information on the performance of the solution methods. An advantage of this approach is that when the performance tests are standardized and statistically supported, we can take advantage of efficient solution methods that have been tested only in conditions of modest computing resources. An experimental study of the problem is presented in which the generated statistical information is used to identify two potential areas to improve the performance of the evaluated method.