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Solving Five Instances of the Artificial Ant Problem with Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract The Artificial Ant problem is a common benchmark problem often used for metaheuristic algorithm performance evaluation. The problem is to find a strategy controlling an agent (called an Artificial Ant) in a game performed on a square toroidal field. Some cells of the field contain “food” pellets, which are distributed along a certain trail. In this paper we use Finite-State Machines (FSM) for strategy representation and present a new algorithm –MuACO sm – for learning finite-state machines. The new algorithm is based on an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO) and a graph representation of the search space. We compare the new algorithm with a genetic algorithm (GA), evolutionary strategies (ES), a genetic programming related approach and reinforcement learning on five instances of the Artificial Ant Problem.