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This has come about after trying to understand what was going on with this question about FindMaximum and regions. My first thought in that scenario was to set-up EvaluationMonitor and StepMonitor to see which points in the region Mathematica visited as it tried to find the maximum.

$Version
(* 10.1.0  for Microsoft Windows (64-bit) (March 24, 2015) *)

(* from the linked question *)
region = Polygon[{{0, 0}, {10, 0}, {10, 5}, {5, 5}, {5, 10}, {0, 10}}];

(* build up a list of regions to test *)
regionlist = {Disk[], Triangle[], Rectangle[], Parallelogram[], region};

(* use FindMaximum *)
result =
 Last@FindMaximum[{x + y, {x, y} \[Element] #}, {x, y}, 
     EvaluationMonitor :> Print["Evaluation: ", x, ",", y],
     StepMonitor :> Print["Step: ", x, ",", y]] & /@ regionlist

graphics = 
  MapThread[
   Show[ContourPlot[x + y, {x, y} \[Element] #1], 
     Graphics[{Red, PointSize[Large], 
       Point[{x, y} /. #2]}]] &, {regionlist, result}];

GraphicsRow[graphics]

enter image description here

When I run this code, for Disk[] I get a list of steps and evaluations at various values of x and y. But when I try using either monitor combined with a region other than Disk[], I get no output. Why is this?

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  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Possibly related: when I try discretizing the regions, I get a FindMaximum::elemc: Unable to resolve the domain or region membership condition message. $\endgroup$ Apr 28, 2015 at 18:11
  • $\begingroup$ @2012rcampion is that for all regions, including Disk[]? $\endgroup$ Apr 29, 2015 at 6:48
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Since the objective function is linear, probably the solution for all these regions except Disk[] comes from a linear programming method, so there are no iterations to monitor. $\endgroup$
    – ilian
    May 7, 2015 at 12:12

1 Answer 1

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$\begingroup$

Thanks to a comment from @ilian, I came back to the question:

Since the objective function is linear, probably the solution for all these regions except Disk[] comes from a linear programming method, so there are no iterations to monitor

And indeed, that's we see. Change the function to e.g. $x^{2}+y^{2}$ and EvaluationMonitor/StepMonitor works a treat.

Alternatively, defining the region with machine-precision numbers also works, i.e.

region = Polygon[{{0., 0.}, {10., 0.}, {10., 5.}, {5., 5.}, {5., 10.}, {0., 10.}}]

and indeed doing this seems to solve the problem in the related question.

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