Ant colonies and emergence

My chapter in the “Ant Colony Optimization” book is just published.

Ant Colony Optimization

The Ant Colony Optimization is an optimization technique inspired by ant colony behavior while searching for food.

Social insects are distributed systems that demonstrate collective intelligence and carry out complex tasks, having individuals with very simple and rudimentary cognitive abilities. In many cases, these tasks exceed the capabilities of a single individual. For instance, ant colonies are able to find the shortest path to food and this is far from the capability of each ant. This collective intelligence emerges by simple processes in the colony and indirect communication among the ants and this happens while ants, individuals of this colony, have so limited cognitive abilities. This is just like having intelligence emerged from very simple rules and interactions.

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