ant colony optimization
n.— «Ant colony optimisation, as the technique is called, turns on the fact that such insects exploit food in what appears to be an intelligent, but is in fact an entirely mindless, way.…he computer scientists fill their machines with virtual ants and give them the task of finding their way through a maze or graph, leaving a coded signal as they pass until, just like the ants, the fastest route emerges. The technique is used in planning the most efficient design of a phone network, the best use of the gates at Heathrow and the management of wireless messages through a grid of receivers. In the phone system, for example, each message leaves a digital scent-mark as it passes through a node and, as it builds up, the fastest track soon attracts the most traffic.» —“ The new theories of evolution” by Steve Jones Telegraph (United Kingdom) July 17, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...