Artificial Ants
Author: Nicolas Monmarché
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010
Pages: 576
ISBN: 978-1848211940
Aimed at: Academic researchers
Rating: 4
Pros: A useful and up-to-date survey 
Cons: Expensive and repetitive
Reviewed by: Mike James

Swarm intelligence is currently fairly trendy - is this textbook a good way in to the topic?

Swarm intelligence is currently fairly trendy and there are some real applications that are worth investigating. This is an academic textbook but with plenty of useful ideas if you want to make a start on practical swarm intelligence.

There is, however, some unnecessary circling around the subject to make it seem more academic and not every reader is going to find it practical enough. The first chapter for example explains many of the basic characteristics of real ants and then extrapolates to what you might want to include in artificial models.


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Chapter 2 gets started on the central task - combinatorial problem solving . This is essentially about finding an optimal path and after the basic ideas Chapter 3 presents a survey of the area. From here we look at the problem of optimisation in the continuum and constraint based optimisation. 

Chapter 6 on the book takes a case study and practical orientation. There are chapters on the Unit Commitment problem in power distribution, optimisation of aluminium bar production, car sequencing, railway infrastructure, magnetic resonance image segmentation, vertex coloring, hidden Markov models and classification,

The book then moves on to consider less abstract applications - mobile robots inspired by insects and artificial insects. The remainder of the book is a collection of fairly arbitrary topics - network optimisation, detecting organisation, application to disabilities, artificial ant art, ant natural language processing and finally bioinformatics or how to get an ant to fold a protein.

As I was reading the book people did repeatedly ask me if I was serious or was it a spoof? When you read the book you will certainly discover that this approach to AI and optimization if no spoof. However, it is a very narrow technique despite the best efforts of the various authors to convince the reader otherwise. While the assorted case studies are impressive as you read them, what is not clear is how well they could have been solved using other methods. There are no direct comparisons of how effective ants are at finding optimal solutions and no real attempt to either evaluate the approach or link it to other techniques (with the possible exception of the genetic algorithm). Overall the presentation tends to be repetitive perhaps this is indicative of the fact that ant-based algorithms aren't that varied.

In the main this is a suitable book if you are trying to get into the world of artificial ant-based algorithms or just want to see what sorts of things have been achieved. As such it is a useful survey.


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Beautiful C++

Author: J. Guy Davidson and Kate Gregory
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Date: December 2021
Pages: 352
ISBN: 978-0137647842
Print: 0137647840
Kindle: B09HTH1X38
Audience: C++ developers
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Mike James
Can C++ be beautiful?



Killer ChatGPT Prompts (Wiley)

Author: Guy Hart-Davis
Publisher: Wiley
Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-1394225255
Print: 1394225253
ASIN: B0CF3WFTWM
Audience: Everyone
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Ian Stirk

This book aims to get optimal answers to your questions from ChatGPT, how does it fare? 


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Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 January 2011 )