Warping search: a new metaheuristic applied to the protein structure prediction

This paper presents a new technique to search the solution of difficult optimization problems. The Warping Search is inspired on the movements of celestial bodies in the universe and their interactions. Based on some concepts of Einstein's General Relativity, the search operators proposed in this approach are inspired on gravitational wave sources such as mass transfer, spin, collapse, explosion and collision and defined based on gravitational fields. The technique has been tested in the Protein Structure Prediction Problem in lattice models that is known to be NP-hard. The presented approach is compared with recent heuristics proposed for the problem and the computational results attest the efficiency of the method.