How Single Ant {ACO} Systems Optimize Pseudo-Boolean Functions

We undertake a rigorous experimental analysis of the optimization behavior of the two most studied single ant ACO systems on several pseudo-boolean functions. By tracking the behavior of the underlying random processes rather than just regarding the resulting optimization time, we gain additional insight into these systems. A main finding is that in those cases where the single ant ACO system performs well, it basically simulates the much simpler (1+1) evolutionary algorithm