Mother Nature, Hacker

Sometimes emulating nature is the smartest and easiest course of action. Instead of building complex, monolithic solutions, it sometimes pays to do our best Thoreau imitation and sit for a while contemplating ants. An ant colony solves problems with sheer numbers: One ant can't do much, but thousands of ants are a formidable problem-solving engine. Ant Colony Optimizers (ACOs) are the algorithmic embodiment of this idea. In his article "Ant Colony Algorithms," Andrew Colin shows how useful such tools can be, especially for problems like network routing over changing topologies.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:53 PM  Permalink