This week, Kostis Gourgoulias will be giving a talk entitled “Solving optimization problems.. with ants?” (abstract below) on Wednesday, Feb. 20th from 5:30-6:30 in 1634. As always, pizza and soda will be provided.
Abstract:
To paraphrase a motto from Numb3rs, ”we all solve optimization problems every day”. From the moment we wake up to the moment we return to bed, we seek to waste as less money and time as possible. And if we happen to be mathematicians, we may also have to solve a couple of optimization problems in math as well. So important is optimization, that one can spend her/his entire
life studying the di?erent methods and then (try to) apply them to di?erent, often extremely hard, problems. E?cient solutions of those problems are worth a lot for both the academic community and the industry. But which method to use? That’s also di?cult to answer because there are as many methods as available problems.
So, what do ants have to do with anything? In 1991, Marco Dorigo introduced a new algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems (think travelling salesman) based on the behaviour of ants scavenging for food. Apart from being a very cool idea on it’s own, it also helped open up a new branch between mathematics and algorithms, that of swarm intelligence. There are many questions that still have not been answered about how much one can do
with those ideas.
In this talk, we will talk a bit about optimization in general, see what is the idea & the math that Dorigo ”stumbled” onto how it can be turned into an algorithm and what does the algorithm actually do when it runs. What better way to pass the afternoon?