h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello

At the moment I'm looking for useful mentions in papers and journals of Ant algorithms, and I was wondering if anyone here knew of any to point me in the direction of.

This is just if you happen to know, I'm looking around anyway so there is no need to go out of your way.

Researcher PSG

not specifically, but I am interested in why?
You working on something along these lines?
Also, check out the a.i. / a-life usenet group plenty of discussions in there!

It wouldn't do any harm to ask Amy the Ant over at U135642 - she's a mine of knowledge on all things ant-like...

Have a word with Martyn Amos at Exeter University, his website is http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~mramos/

In my final year at Liverpool Uni (he transferred to Exeter the year I graduated) he ran a module on Bioinformatics, which had a section on the Ant Trail genetic algoritm. If he can't help you or doesn't have the details any more I'll see what I can dig out of my module notes.

Thanks for the pointers I'll look into them.

As for the why, I am doing some reading around on Ants for a Uni project. Hence why I don't want people to go out of their way, after all it should be my research. It's just I thought there might be people who could point me in the direction of a few good papers or articles.

Researcher PSG

The only thing I can claim is to have read an artical in a New Scientist once about a mathamatical alergerithm that when run even though the component structure and logic is simple the patterns are not.

-- DoctorMO --

i prolly can't help much but i have a slight knack for thinking in C
first u should figger out which ant behaviors u wanna incorpor8
u will want some algorithms such as:
movement
communication
nutrition
some sort of learning thing
physical strength (that is, increasing when the ant moves something heavier than it is used to, like a muscle)
umm
i dunno
basically think of it like writing an RPG with all sorts of tweakable stats
>8^B

i could prolly b more help if we talked in realtime
get on IRC and try the #codegeeks room on irc.whatnet.org
in fact, i think everyone here should talk there
>8^B

depends what kind of ants, I thought he meant the mathamatical kind, but anyones gues.

-- DoctorMO --

Thanks for the suggestion.

But DoctorMO is right, I was really looking at the theoretical ant model used to solve problems.

Researcher PSG

Did you contact Martyn Amos? How is the old fella? He'd kill me if he heard I just said that, or even worse deduct points from my team in the sunday evening pub quiz he used to run

I can still dig through my notes if necessary from the module he ran, and email them on if you want them. The ant algorithm material only covers a few pages, but it would be a start (all they are doing at the moment is sitting on my shelf gathering dust)

No I haven't contacted him yet. I managed to find a few other sources and it has taken a bit of time to work though them.

Was it only a short mention in the notes then? It's just I have found a few detailed sources. (Not that I'm not grateful for the help)

Researcher PSG

can't believe I haven't posted to this thread yet, as I do research with Ant Algorithms myself...

if you want to know what Ant Algorithms are, plain and simple, look for the following paper by Marco Dorigo, Vittorio Maniezzo and Alberto Colorni: "The Ant System: Optimization by a colony of cooperating agents". It was published in: IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics-Part B, Vol.26, No.1, 1996, pp.1-13.

This paper describes the algorithm and applies it to the Travelling Salesman Problem. You can probably find the paper on Citeseer.

What are you trying to use the algorithm for, out of interest?

o
u meant ant as in genetic or as opposed to brute force
i thought u were talkin about an ant colony sim
i feel stupid and retract my statement
just goes to show u i need more math classes
i let nerds down everywhere
>8^B

Indeed

-- DoctorMO --

(*~~*)
>8^B

vsorry,

-- DoctorMO --

lol
tis quite alright
>8^B

Jao

-- DoctorMO --

?
jao?
whazzat?
>8^B