The customary need for rejection of candidate moves in simulated annealing is eliminated by biasing the selection of moves according to their effect on the cost function. An efficient implementation can offer a significant speed-up, though with increased memory. The logic partitioning problem is used as an illustration; both simple moves and pairwise interchanges are considered.

A "secret sharing system" permits a secret to be shared amongntrustees in such a way that anykof them can recover the secret, but anyk-1have complete uncertainty about it. A linear coding scheme for secret sharing is exhibited which subsumes the polynomial interpolation method proposed by Shamir and can also be viewed as a deterministic version of Blakley's probabilistic method. Bounds on the maximum value ofnfor a givenkand secret size are derived for any system, linear or nonlinear. The proposed scheme achieves the lower bound which, for practical purposes, differs insignificantly from the upper bound. The scheme may be extended to protect several secrets. Methods to protect against deliberate tampering by any of the trustees are also presented.