Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book.

A group of researchers in Milan, Italy, have come up with a few new varieties of evolution and learning. Their methods fill a few holes in Ackley's proposed "space of all possible types of computation." Because they were inspired by the collective behavior of ant colonies, the Milan group call their searches "Ant Algorithms."

Ants have distributed parallel systems all figured out. Ants are the history of social organization and the future of computers. A colony may contain a million workers and hundreds of queens, and the entire mass of them can build a city while only dimly aware of one another. Ants can swarm over a field and find the choicest food in it as if the swarm were a large compound eye. They weave vegetation together in coordinated parallel rows, and collectively keep their nest at a steady temperature, although not a single ant has ever lived who knows how to regulate temperature.

An army of ants too dumb to measure and too blind to see far can rapidly find the shortest route across a very rugged landscape. This calculation perfectly mirrors the evolutionary search: dumb, blind, simultaneous agents trying to optimize a path on a computationally rugged landscape. Ants are a parallel processing machine.

Real ants communicate with each other by a chemical system called pheromones. Ants apply pheromones on each other and on their environment. These aromatic smells dissipate over time. The odors can also be relayed by a chain of ants picking up a scent and remanufacturing it to pass on to others. Pheromones can be thought of as information broadcasted or communicated within the ant system.

The Milan group (Alberto Colorni, Marco Dorigo, and Vittorio Maniezzo) constructed formulas modeled on ant logic. Their virtual ants ("vants") were dumb processors in a giant community operating in parallel. Each vant had a meager memory, and could communicate locally. Yet the rewards of doing well were shared by others in a kind of distributed computation.

The Italians tested their ant machine on a standard benchmark, the traveling salesman problem. The riddle was: what is the shortest route between a large number of cities, if you can only visit each city once? Each virtual ant in the colony would set out rambling from city to city leaving a trail of pheromones. The shorter the path between cities, the less the pheromone evaporated. The stronger the pheromone signal, the more other ants followed that route. Shorter paths were thus self-reinforcing. Run for 5,000 rounds or so, the ant group-mind would evolve a fairly optimal global route.

The Milan group played with variations. Did it make any difference if the vants all started at one city or were uniformly distributed? (Distributed was better.) Did it make any difference how many vants one ran concurrently? (More was better until you hit the ratio of one ant for every city, when the advantage peaked.) By varying parameters, the group came up with a number of computational ant searches.

Ant algorithms are a type of Lamarckian search. When one ant stumbles upon a short route, that information is indirectly broadcast to the other vants by the trail's pheromone strength. In this way learning in one ant's lifetime is indirectly incorporated into the whole colony's inheritance of information. Individual ants effectively broadcast what they have learned into their hive. Broadcasting, like cultural teaching, is a part of Lamarckian search. Ackley: "There are ways to exchange information other than sex. Like the evening news."

The cleverness of the ants, both real and virtual, is that the amount of information invested into "broadcasting" is very small, done very locally, and is very weak. The notion of introducing weak broadcasting into evolution is quite appealing. If there is any Lamarckism in earthly biology it is buried deep. But there remains a universe full of strange types of potential computation that might employ various modes of Lamarckian broadcasting. I know of programmers fooling around with algorithms to mimic "memetic" evolution -- the flow of ideas (memes) from one mind to another, trying to capture the essence and power of cultural evolution. Out of all the possible ways to connect the nodes in distributed computers, only a very few, such as the ant algorithms, have even been examined.

As late as 1990, parallel computers were derided by experts as controversial, specialized, and belonging the lunatic fringe. They were untidy and hard to program. The lunatic fringe disagreed. In 1989, Danny Hillis boldly made a widely publicized bet with a leading computer expert that as early as 1995, more bits per month would be processed by parallel machines than by serial machines. He is looking right. As serial computers audibly groaned under the burden of pushing complex jobs through the tiny funnel of von Neumann's serial processor, a change in expert opinion suddenly swept through the computer industry. Peter Denning signaled the new perspective when he wrote in a paper published by Science ("Highly Parallel Computation," November 30, 1990), "Highly parallel computing architectures are the only means to achieve the computational rates demanded by advanced scientific problems." John Koza of Stanford's Computer Science Department says flatly, "Parallel computers are the future of computing. Period."

But parallel computers remain hard to manage. Parallel software is a tangled web of horizontal, simultaneous causes. You can't check such nonlinearity for flaws since it's all hidden corners. There is no narrative to step through. The code has the integrity of a water balloon, yielding in one spot as another bulges. Parallel computers can easily be built but can't be easily programmed.

Parallel computers embody the challenge of all distributed swarm systems, including phone networks, military systems, the planetary 24-hour financial web, and large computer networks. Their complexity is taxing our ability to steer them. "The complexity of programming a massively parallel machine is probably beyond us," Tom Ray told me. "I don't think we'll ever be able to write software that fully uses the capacity of parallelism."

Little dumb creatures in parallel that can "write" better software than humans can suggests to Ray a solution for our desire for parallel software. "Look," he says, "ecological interactions are just parallel optimization techniques. A multicellular organism essentially runs massively parallel code of an astronomical scale. Evolution can 'think' of parallel programming ways that would take us forever to think of. If we can evolve software, we'll be way ahead." When it comes to distributed network kinds of things, Rays says, "Evolution is the natural way to program."

The natural way to program! That's an ego-deflating lesson. Humans should stick to what they do best: small, elegant, minimal systems that are fast and deep. Let natural evolution (artificially injected) do the messy big work.