Web Invasion Tour (WIT) and the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)

Peter Caputa is at it again with his Web Invasion Tour. Having been one of his selected victims, I mean selections, a few weeks ago, he has been asking me and some other bloggers to help in the tour. Since I just finished reading Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson, I am thinking about the ant perspective of things a lot lately, I thought that Peter's approach was much like Marco Dorigo's ant colony experiments in trying to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem.

One of Marco's papers, The Ant System: Optimization by a colony of cooperating agents, has the following abstract:

An analogy with the way ant colonies function has suggested the definition of a new computational paradigm, which we call Ant System. We propose it as a viable new approach to stochastic combinatorial optimization. The main characteristics of this model are positive feedback, distributed computation, and the use of a constructive greedy heuristic. Positive feedback accounts for rapid discovery of good solutions, distributed computation avoids premature convergence, and the greedy heuristic helps find acceptable solutions in the early stages of the search process. We apply the proposed methodology to the classical Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and report simulation results.

Peter's approach to selecting a number of weblogs, leaving positive comments and linking to them where appropriate is WIT's method of developing a pheromone trail which can be picked up by others. His approach by recruiting me and a number of others is similar to having lots of worker ants who go out foraging for food, continually adapting behavior by following the successful marked trails of those who have successfully found it. The pheromone trail of the WIT, that is made up of positive feedback, comments and links, will attract other ants (blog readers) to find them as well.

With the growth of blogs being tracked by Technorati being added at the rate of 12,000 a day, (thanks to Joe McCarthy for finding that post), how can anyone find promising good blogs among the chaff of mediocre blogs out there. Maybe we should consider the ant...

Consider the ant, O sluggard, Observe her ways and be wise, which having no chief, officer or ruler, prepares her food in the summer, and gathers her provision in the harvest. Proverbs 6:6