Stigmergic pathfinding: ants discover shortest routes via pheromone trails
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Ant Colony Optimization (Dorigo 1992) mimics how real ants find shortest paths.
Ants deposit pheromone when they find food; shorter paths are completed faster and accumulate more pheromone per unit time.
This positive feedback amplifies the shortest route. Pheromone evaporation prevents convergence to suboptimal paths.
ACO solves NP-hard combinatorial problems (TSP, vehicle routing) in polynomial time heuristically.
Here ants navigate a 2D grid from the nest (yellow) to food (red).