Artificial ant based algorithms
Résumé
Artificial Evolution is not the only method that inspired from Nature. Some researchers try to grow artificial plants or animals (called animats) possibly through Artificial Evolution, but not exclusively. Alternately, artificial life can be used to solve the same kind of problems as above. For instance, schooling or flocking behaviour in fish or birds has been understood and is very much used in movies to simulate animal herds in a very realistic way. This has also led to a very efficient optimization algorithm called Particle Swarm Optimization (Kennedy et al. 2001). In another domain, ant colonies also present very interesting behaviour that can be really efficient at problem-solving as for instance, it has been shown that paths between anthills and food spots are optimal. The mechanism used by ants has been discovered and now constitutes the core of Ant Colony Optimization, the first application of which was to solve the TSP problem (Dorigo et al. 1999). Nicolas Monmarché's talk will concentrate on algorithms based on artificial ants.