What is an Ant colony optimization algorithm?

What is the time complexity of the solution of traveling sales man problem by ant colony optimization?

• Answer:

  it will depend on the distribution of the data points, and exact value can not be calculated prior.    But it should be more than in general. also, The most direct solution would be to try all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation (ordered combinations) and see which one is cheapest (using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_search). The running time for this approach lies within a polynomial factor of , the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial of the number of cities, so this solution becomes impractical even for only 20 cities. One of the earliest applications of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming is the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Held%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%93Karp_algorithm&action=edit&redlink=1 that solves the problem in time                   (source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem#Computational_complexity -wikipedia)