What is ACO ?
Ant Colony Optimization is the evolution of the Ant Algorithms, algorithms that were based on observation on ants. It is a
metaheuristic algorithm that is used to solve complex problems (NP-hard) such as the Travelling Salesman Problem (in this problem, a salesman has to travel across each city in a minimum distance). There is a lot of litterate on ACO and TSP on the web...
Where does it come from ?
This implementation is based on the book
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10139 from Marco Dorigo.
What about some results?
Here are some outputs of the TSP computation of
http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/groups/comopt/software/TSPLIB95/ using my framework. The red line represents the best-so-far solution, the other lines are colored with respect to their pheromone intensity.
