

Next generation of algorithms inspired by problem-solving ants - droid
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-algorithms-problem-solving-ants.html

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jerf
These articles are disappointing. First, people have already long since
explored this design space for things like network routing and holding it up
like it's a new idea is academically fraudulent. (I don't know whether it's
the journalist or the scientists without more research, but I'd lay money on
the journalist.) Second, the _real_ world inspiration of ants is somewhat
limited by the fact that the ants have been thrown at problems where, in
computational terms, they have a lot more ants than complexities in the
problem. A naive translation of the "ant algorithms" to computer programs
would produce a very, very, very slow solution.

It's sort of cool, it's a nifty technique with limited applicability, but can
we _please_ stop acting like antlike-automata is some sort of cutting-edge
brilliant breakthrough rather than a relatively standard tool in the belt for
some domains? It's not the next generation and arguably not even the "current"
generation.

~~~
abhikshah
This is par for the course with physorg (and to a slightly lesser degree,
newscientist).

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merraksh
I doubt this could be an efficient way to compute a shortest path. All of this
amounts to a (very inefficient) parallel implementation of an algorithm that
checks whether the Bellman-Ford conditions apply to a suboptimal path, as the
path is gradually improved.

The Bellman-Ford condition on an arc (i,j) of a graph G constrains the
difference of potential between the two nodes i and j, (y_j - y_i), to be no
more than the length c_ij of the arc. When it is violated, a better path can
be found by modifying the potentials.

The inefficiency here lies in the random nature of these checks, which (if I
correctly understood) modify. A much more intuitive algorithm is Bellman-
Ford's algorithm, which works even when some arc costs are negative, while
Dijkstra's algorithm, much more efficient, can only be applied on non-negative
arc costs.

Networks with millions of nodes (such as GPS road networks) could hardly
benefit from this ant-colony algorithm, and there are already better
algorithms -- see the work by Andrew Goldberg, for instance
(<http://www.avglab.com/andrew>).

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drtse4
Nothing new, they should check the work of Marco Dorigo,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization>

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stan_rogers
I could have sworn I read about this in GEB in '79, and I don't think
Hofstaedter would argue that he was postulating anything new with Aunt
Hillary.

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hasenj
> An ant colony is the last place you'd expect to find a maths whiz

I actually remember seeing something very similar to this on TV when I was a
kid, and the program I was watching was even older than me; probably produced
before I was even born.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Same "news" different source: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1989565>

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geuis
The other problem with this article is that it really says nothing about
algorithms. The title, "Next gen algorithms inspired by..." implies that
someone actually _wrote new algorithms_. That didn't happen. Instead its a
lengthy pronouncement of how ants explored a maze, with the author throwing on
the normal uninformed speculation statement at the end to add some keywords to
the text.

