Ants To The Rescue

Strictly for people with mathematical and operations research inclinations. Someone introduced me to the notion of "Ant Colony Optimization" (ACO) today. First proposed by Marco Dorigo in his Ph.D. thesis, this "metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization problems" is inspired by the behaviour of real ant colonies.

ACO is just one of many techniques that are part of the fields of "Nature Inspired *", including

• Nature Inspired Distributed Computing
  
• Nature Inspired Routing etc.
  
• Nature Inspired Optimisation
  
• Nature Inspired Combinatorial Heuristics
  

Bees, the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish, are all grist to these mills apparently. Very intriguing.