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Incorporating Swarm Intelligence Into Computer AI
An anonymous reader writes "From optimizing truck delivery routes to inspiring nerve-cell-based cognition models, ant intelligence has arrived. From the Economist: 'In 1992 Dr. Dorigo and his group began developing Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), an algorithm that looks for solutions to a problem by simulating a group of ants wandering over an area and laying down pheromones. ACO proved good at solving travelling-salesman-type problems. Since then it has grown into a whole family of algorithms, which have been applied to many practical questions. ... Ant-like algorithms have also been applied to the problem of routing information through communication networks. Dr. Dorigo and Gianni Di Caro, another researcher at IDSIA, have developed AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so. Other packets sniff the trails thus created and choose accordingly. In computer simulations and tests on small-scale networks, AntNet has been shown to outperform existing routing protocols."
Until it passed by a group of people having a picnic.
It just sounds like the classic hill climbing algorithm to me.
That's because it's very similar -- with a massive stochastic component. It might be effective at routing, but I image leaving "pheromone traces" over network routes to indicate quality (latency, bandwidth, whatever) is something that will make sure security researchers have jobs for a long, long time.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Dorigo et al. made their groundbreaking paper in 1996 (based on observations by Deneubourg in 89), and then nothing. Nothing new on the theoretical part, no new application. Even routing using ACO like algorithm has been published as early as 1994. The newest extension based on these algorithms is an interactive distributed image retrieval system by Picard et al. back in about 2006 (as far as I know). So nothing new nor groundbreaking here.
Those blast marks on that router are too precise for sand people
How do you incorporate Swarm intelligence into computer AI? Simple - SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS!
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