New Free Online Book (by me): Essentials of Metaheuristics

Well ants are hard and you made it a bit easier, thanks for letting us know about your book and for making it available to the community.

I scanned over a few of the chapters and is an excellent treatise. Ever since I read a long forgotten book on Programming and was hooked by the practical examples provided (and started coding!) I would love to see some real examples accompanying the algorithms.

For example this paper by S. T. Mugford, E. B. Mallon, and N. R. Franks of the Centre for Mathematical Biology and Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, published a paper http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/12/6/655 [pdf] about how colonies of the ant <it>Leptothorax albipennis</it> naturally inhabit flat rock crevices. Scouts can determine, before initiating an emigration, if a nest has sufficient area to house their colony. They postulated that this was achieved using Buffon's needle's method! Would love to see how this would have fitted with metaheuristic algorithms!

I also loved the discussion on random generators (needs a little bit of expansion)!

Everything you wanted to know about genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, etc. Feel free to leave any comments or questions.

Thank for posting this book on HN, and for your permissive (CC) license in general. (Like many around here, I suspect it will only make your work more popular :D)

I noticed you just created your HN account. I think you'll like it here. Welcome, and I hope you stick around and take part in lots of threads in the future, would love to have your insights.

I had a chuckle at the 'If you are without honour you can download it here directly'. I think if the music industry would set up a site with that line in it together with a registration form and a 15 cent download fee they'd be doing just fine.

Thank you!

Professor Luke, I had the privilege of taking your AI class, which was the most interesting and fun CS class I took while in college. You are an outstanding professor. Thanks for the book!