Multisection: Parallelized bisection. Pallone, S., Frazier, P. I., & Henderson, S. G. In Tolk, A., Diallo, D., Ryzhov, I. O., Yilmaz, L., Buckley, S., & Miller, J. A., editors, Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference, pages 3773–3784, Piscataway NJ, 2014. IEEE.
Multisection: Parallelized bisection [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
We consider a one-dimensional bisection method for finding the zero of a function, where function evaluations can be performed asynchronously in a parallel computing environment. Using dynamic programming, we characterize the Bayes-optimal policy for sequentially choosing points at which to query the function. In choosing these points, we face a trade-off between aggressively reducing the search space in the short term, and maintaining a desirable spread of queries in the long-term. Our results provide insight on how this trade-off is affected by function evaluation times, risk preferences, and computational budget.

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