Back in 2001 I was working on an new app that was designed to generate efficient routes for garbage collection trucks for a region of Portugal. The government

Back in 2001 I was working on an new app that was designed to generate efficient routes for garbage collection trucks for a region of Portugal. The government of that region wanted to minimize fuel consumption and travel times. This is basically the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. We soon realized that using brute force to try all possible combinations would be impossible and someone handed me a research paper on using Ant Colony Systems to solve the Travelling Salesman problem. I was skeptical, but after implementing it and comparing the results with the brute force generated data ( that took a LOT more time to produce ) I was blown away. The results weren't perfect but good enough to be a vast improvement on the routes used before. Emergent behavior can be amazing.