4th International Workshop, ANTS 2004 Brussels, Belgium, September 5 - 8, 2004 Proceedings

First, the term "ant algorithms" was slower in spreading in Ihe research com muni ly lhan Ihe lerm "swarm intelligence", while at Ihe same lime research in so-called swarm robotics was the subject of increasing activity: il was therefore an obvious choice to substitute Ihe term ant algorithms with Ihe more accepted and used term swarm intelligence.
Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a number of interesting and promising research directions , we think it is fair to say that its most successful slrand is the one known as "ant colony optimization". Ant colony optimization, first introduced in the early 1990s as a novel tool for the approximate solution of discrete optimization problems, has recently seen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimization (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings). It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name.