Hysteretic Optimization for Protein Folding on the Lattice

Hysteretic optimization (HO) is a recently proposed optimization method based on the well-known demagnetization process of magnetic materials in physics. In this study, we apply HO to the protein folding problem, an attractive problem in computational biology, by generalizing the external field. The experimental results with benchmark problems show the proposed method is competitive with other popular algorithms, such as extremal optimization.