Pheromone trails guide ants to discover short traveling salesman routes
Best tour: –
Iteration: 0
Improvement: –
Ant Colony Optimization mimics foraging behavior where ants deposit pheromones on shorter paths.
Each ant builds a tour using probabilistic selection: P(i→j) ∝ τ(i,j)^α · η(i,j)^β where η=1/distance.
After each iteration pheromones evaporate by factor (1-ρ) and are reinforced proportional to 1/tour_length.
Strong β favors greedy (nearest-neighbor) choices; strong α exploits pheromone trails.