Global optimization for track finding

Hopfield networks with mean-field annealing have been proposed for track finding in particle detectors by Peterson and Denby. In this paper we investigate and compare some other-probabilistic and heuristic-approaches to finding the global minimum of the associated energy function: Simulated annealing, threshold accepting, great deluge, record-to-record travel, and tabu search. We also use a branch-and-bound and a branch-and-cut algorithm in order to obtain the exact global minimum.