Comparing variants of MMAS ACO algorithms on pseudo-boolean functions

Abstract

Recently, the first rigorous runtime analyses of ACO algorithms have been presented. These results concentrate on variants of the MAX-MIN ant system by St¨utzle and Hoos and consider their runtime on simple pseudo-Boolean functions such as OneMax and LeadingOnes. Interestingly, it turns out that a variant called 1-ANT is very sensitive to the choice of the evaporation factor while a recent technical report by Gutjahr and Sebastiani suggests partly opposite results for their variant called MMAS. In this paper, we elaborate on the differences between the two ACO algorithms, generalize the techniques by Gutjahr and Sebastiani and show improved results.