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Multiagent Systems
The first comprehensive introduction to multiagent systems and contemporary distributed artificial intelligence suitable as a textbook, providing detailed coverage of basic topics as well as several closely related ones.
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Bees Top the Supply Chain
Colony Optimisation for Management
 
Bees Top the Supply Chain

Info Week has a short, but interesting article about IBM's latest focus -- Think They'll Start Spelling It Supply 'ChAIn'? Essentially, the company aims to conquer another lucrative market, that of supply chain management.

So what does this have to do with bees? It was only a hint in the original article, but I presume colony based optimisation is used. This essentially models lots of agents (usually ants, but bees in this case), that move around more or less randomly in the search space. With ants, the pheromone trails each ant leaves behind slowly builds up, and tends to provide good solutions to problems (via positive feedback). The field is quite recent, and known as ant systems. Though I've only seen it applied well to graph like problems, this is definitely something to watch out for!

933 posts.
Thursday 25 April, 19:45
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