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I found this article useful.

What I was really hoping for was a layman's translation of the maths on wikipedia [ie. how to implement]. But this is a good jumping off point for figuring out which black box to use.

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This is what I was thinking as well! The explanation is good but it's the actual steps of the algorithm that are the difficult part!

So you want to do math without knowing how to do math?

I'm just saying it takes about 30 seconds to explain the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in plain english, and the wikipedia article is almost intentionally esoteric on the matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis–Hastings_algorithm

Meanwhile the much more complex Firefly algorithm is adequately explained in just 3 sentences that are obvious to understand:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_algorithm

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