Problem reduction is a basic concept behind much of AI search. The standard approach is to view problem reduction in terms of AND/OR graphs and then to concentrate on graph search techniques to nd a solution to the original problem. However these techniques depend upon global graph properties. By taking a more object-oriented approach we can ignore the graphs as a whole and instead need only de...

The main point of proposed approach to study ants’ cognitive abilities is that our experiments provide a situation in which insects have to transmit information quantitatively known to the experimentalist, in order to obtain food. One may measure the complexity of tasks they solved in order to pass definite pieces of information from scout ants to foragers. Our previous experiments, basing on i...

A growing interest toward automatic, computer-based tools has been spreading among forensic scientists and anthropologists wishing to extend the armamentarium of traditional statistical analysis and classification techniques. The combination of multiple paradigms is often required in order to fit the difficult, real-world scenarios involved in the area. The paper presents a comparison of combin...

OBJECTIVES The effects of a Boy Scout Five-A-Day Badge program on fruit juice (FJ) and low-fat vegetable (LV) consumption were evaluated using a two-condition (treatment, active-attention-placebo-control) group randomized trial, with three data collection periods (baseline, immediate post, 6-month post). METHODS Forty-two Boy Scout troops (n=473, 10- to 14-year-old Scouts) in Houston, TX, wer...

This paper presents the techniques that we have been developing recently to solve the problem of path clearance. In the path clearance problem the robot needs to reach its goal as quickly as possible without being detected by enemies. The problem is complicated by the fact that the robot does not know the precise locations of enemies, but has a list of their possible locations. Either the robot...

The natural behaviour of the honeybee has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years and several algorithms have been developed that mimic swarm behaviour to solve optimisation problems. This paper introduces an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). A Modified ABC algorithm is proposed to improve the solution quality of the ...

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm-based metaheuristic optimization technique, developed by inspiring foraging and dance behaviors of honey bee colonies. ABC consists of four phases named as initialization, employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee. The employed bees try to improve their solution in employed bees phase. If an employed bee cannot improve self-solution in a certa...