A single ant isn't very smart. But huge colonies of ants are capable of complex feats of organisation – and it's all thanks to their clever biological algorithms ...

"So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed and scalable - the very qualities that we need in large engineered sitributed systems," she said.

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is a metaheuristic nature-inspired technique for solving various combinatorial optimization problems. The shortest-path problem is an important ...

Like an ant colony on the search for food, the algorithm screens through the molecular building blocks for components with the desired properties.