Self-Organized Stigmergic Document Maps: Environment as a Mechanism for Context Learning

Social insect societies and more specifically ant colonies, are distributed systems that, in spite of the simplicity of their individuals, present a highly structured social organization. As a result of this organization, ant colonies can accomplish complex tasks that in some cases exceed the individual capabilities of a single ant. The study of ant colonies behavior and of their self-organizing capabilities is of interest to knowledge retrieval/ management and decision support systems sciences, because it provides models of distributed adaptive organization which are useful to solve difficult optimization, classification, and distributed control problems, among others. In the present work we overview some models derived from the observation of real ants, emphasizing the role played by stigmergy as distributed communication paradigm, and we present a novel strategy to tackle unsupervised clustering as well as data retrieval problems. The present ant clustering system (ACLUSTER) avoids ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Vitorino Ramos, Juan J. Merelo Guervós
• Keywords: Ant Colonies, Ant Colonies Behavior, CORR 2004, Education, Present Ant Clustering