No ant carries a map, and no ant compares the two routes. Each simply drips pheromone onto the path it has just walked and leans toward whichever scent is stronger, while the scent evaporates. The shorter route is completed more times in the same interval, so it accumulates scent faster, and positive feedback does the rest. Fast evaporation makes the colony forget and re-explore; slow evaporation converges firmly but risks clinging to whatever route was found first, and that exact mechanism became the ACO algorithm of Marco Dorigo in the early 1990s.
No ant carries a map, and no ant compares the two routes. Each simply drips pheromone onto the path it has just walked and leans toward whichever scent is stronger, while the scent evaporates. The shorter route is completed more times in the same interval, so it accumulates scent faster, and positive feedback does the rest. Fast evaporation makes the colony forget and re-explore; slow evaporation converges firmly but risks clinging to whatever route was found first, and that exact mechanism became the ACO algorithm of Marco Dorigo in the early 1990s.
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