Using Ants to do Math
Have you ever seen ants? Of course you have. Of course you are not from Antarctica. But if you are from Antarctica then for your information Ants are a type of small insect which you can find almost anywhere in every continent (except Antarctica). Ants belong to an order of insects called Hymenoptera and the insect family Formicidae means ‘ant family’. Now where do these little guys live? The answer is everywhere. In the first place, ants are not like bees and wasps, which build their nests out of wax or carton and form polygonal cells whose structure is instinctively fixed for each species by heredity. Ant-nests, on the contrary, are nearly all irregular, variable and adaptable to circumstances. This is probably one of the reasons ants are one of the most adaptive species. The field of ‘‘ ant algorithms’ ’ models derived from observing these little guys and using these models as a source of inspiration for the design of novel algorithms for the solution of optimization and distri...
