FW: Ants solve Traveling Salesman Problem

[Kevin McGee <mcgee@interval.com>]

A recent issue of Biosystems (1997, v 43, 73-81), has an article titled "Ant 
colonies for the travelling salesman problem", with the following abstract:
We describe artificial ant colonies capable of solving the travelling salesman 
problem (TSP).  Ants of the artificial colony are able to generate successfully 
shorter feasible tours by using information accumulated in the form of a 
pheromone trail deposited on the edges of the TSP graph.  Computer simulations 
demonstrate that the artificial ant colony is capable of generating good 
solutions to both symmetric and asymmetric instances of the TSP.  The method is 
an example, like simulated annealing, neural networks and evolutionary 
computation, of the successful use of a natural metaphor to design an 
optimization algorithm.