Ant Colony Optimization is an

Ant Colony Optimization is an elegant branch of cellular automata theory that's being used to come up with optimized solutions to really, really hard problems (like the Travelling Salesman Problem). Its applications right now are primarily network load-balancing and automated manufacturing, but there's some really, really tasty applications for distributed computing (OpenCola Folders can be thought of as an Ant Colony Optimization simulation). Link Discuss (Thanks, Ethan!)