Incorporating Swarm Intelligence Into Computer AI 64
An anonymous reader writes "From optimizing truck delivery routes to inspiring nerve-cell-based cognition models, ant intelligence has arrived. From the Economist: 'In 1992 Dr. Dorigo and his group began developing Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), an algorithm that looks for solutions to a problem by simulating a group of ants wandering over an area and laying down pheromones. ACO proved good at solving travelling-salesman-type problems. Since then it has grown into a whole family of algorithms, which have been applied to many practical questions. ... Ant-like algorithms have also been applied to the problem of routing information through communication networks. Dr. Dorigo and Gianni Di Caro, another researcher at IDSIA, have developed AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so. Other packets sniff the trails thus created and choose accordingly. In computer simulations and tests on small-scale networks, AntNet has been shown to outperform existing routing protocols."
Nothing new here... (Score:4, Informative)
Dorigo et al. made their groundbreaking paper in 1996 (based on observations by Deneubourg in 89), and then nothing. Nothing new on the theoretical part, no new application. Even routing using ACO like algorithm has been published as early as 1994. The newest extension based on these algorithms is an interactive distributed image retrieval system by Picard et al. back in about 2006 (as far as I know). So nothing new nor groundbreaking here.
And this is different from OSPF how? (Score:3, Informative)
How is "AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so..." any different from bog standard hop count updates on existing routers, and routing on the basis of the shortest path?
I think the authors are playing semantic games here, not doing research.
Interesting Paper (Score:4, Informative)
I just covered Ant-based load balancing on communications networks in a distributed systems class. Here's the paper we read. It's an easy read, and quite interesting.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/96/HPL-96-76.pdf [hp.com]
Re:Interesting Paper (Score:3, Informative)
that was one of the original papers on the topic, I suggest also to read the (a bit later) AntNet papers I wrote with Dorigo. I have a web page on the topic (nothing much, but there are some good references there):
http://www.idsia.ch/~gianni/antnet.html [idsia.ch]