Readily implementable conjugate gradient methods

Conjugate gradient methods have been extensively used to locate unconstrained minimum points of real-valued functions. At present, there are several readily implementable conjugate gradient algorithms that do not require exact line search and yet are shown to be superlinearly convergent. However, these existing algorithms usually require several trials to find an acceptable stepsize at each iteration, and their inexact line search can be very timeconsuming.In this paper we present new readily implementable conjugate gradient algorithms that will eventually require only one trial stepsize to find an acceptable stepsize at each iteration.Making usual continuity assumptions on the function being minimized, we have established the following properties of the proposed algorithms. Without any convexity assumptions on the function being minimized, the algorithms are globally convergent in the sense that every accumulation point of the generated sequences is a stationary point. Furthermore, when the generated sequences converge to local minimum points satisfying second-order sufficient conditions for optimality, the algorithms eventually demand only one trial stepsize at each iteration, and their rate of convergence isn-step superlinear andn-step quadratic.This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ENG 76-09913.