Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is an effective population-based meta-heuristic
for the solution of a wide variety of problems. As a population-based
algorithm, its computation is intrinsically massively parallel, and it is
there- fore theoretically well-suited for implementation on Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs). The ACO algorithm comprises two main stages: Tour construction
and Pheromone update. The former has been previously implemented on the GPU,
using a task-based parallelism approach. However, up until now, the latter has
always been implemented on the CPU.
In this paper we present a novel genetic algorithm (GA) solution to a simple
yet challenging commercial puzzle game known as the Zen Puzzle Garden (ZPG). We
describe the game in detail, before presenting a suitable encoding scheme and
fitness function for candidate solutions. We then compare the performance of
the genetic algorithm with that of the A* algorithm.
This paper discusses the problem of placing weighted items in a circular
container in two-dimensional space. This problem is of great practical
significance in various mechanical engineering domains, such as the design of
communication satellites. Two constructive heuristics are proposed, one for
packing circular items and the other for packing rectangular items. These work
by first optimizing object placement order, and then optimizing object
positioning.
Motivated by questions in biology and distributed computing, we investigate
the behaviour of particular cellular automata, modelled as one-dimensional
arrays of identical finite automata. We investigate what sort of
self-stabilising cooperative behaviour these can induce in terms of waves of
cellular state changes along a filament of cells. We discover what the minimum
requirements are, in terms of numbers of states and the range of communication
between automata, to observe this for individual filaments.