On Jun 26, 2012, at 9:50 PM, Matt Peddie wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm using an automatic differentiation package to get analytic Jacobians
> and Hessians for my objective function.  I see from [1] and the API
> reference that no NLopt algorithms currently support passing a function
> to compute the Hessian (they all approximate it).
> 
> Are there any plans for adding this functionality?  
> 
> I had a look at slsqp.c from nlopt-2.2.4, but it looks like adding it
> myself would be a pretty serious undertaking.  Note that unlike in [1],
> I'm not optimizing functions of millions of variables; my application is
> closer to 100.

You wouldn't want to add it to SLSQP, as that is designed to be a quasi-Newton 
code that estimates the Hessian, and it is also very messy code as you can see.

I have recently played with adding an MMA-like algorithm that allows you to 
pass in an approximate Hessian as a preconditioner, which could in principle 
exploit an exact Hessian if you supply it.  On the other hand, I can only prove 
convergence if the preconditioner is positive semi-definite, so if your Hessian 
does not have this property it may cause problems.
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