It must have been the month of August/September. 2010. I was in my final year of my graduation. The H.O.D. handed me and my friend a printout of 7 pages. It was a paper published from the university of Tehran on solving combinatorial problems modelling natural environments. You are looking at ACO (Ant Colony Optimization), Traveling Salesman Problem being solved by “Intelligent Water Droplets”.
At that point of time, when the mind and body is excited to bunk classes, play football, I was handed a research paper which took me 10+ days to go over a 7 page printout. The level of english and concept we were used to studying, this research paper was leaps and bounds ahead in terms of my comprehension capabilities. By the time I was finished comprehending the paper, I was fascinated with the concept it shared.
The esense of the paper was pretty simple. How to solve real world problem utilizing examples and models from the natural environment. Let me give you few examples.
Have you ever noticed how ants will quickly find anything sweet (few pieces of sugar crystals lying on kitchen slab) on their own? How come they all follow a strict path once the crystal of sugar is found by any one of the ants. How does the first ant, signals the others? Observations made from such real life natural environments can be utilised to solve real world problems. The type of problems that one chooses to solve can be varied.
Back in 2010 my friend and me were tasked with solving the Traveling Salesman Problem modelling it on the natural environment of water droplets finding the optimal path from its origin to the delta. In solving our problem, we had to imagine, how each water droplet in a huge river has an inherent intelligence with it. We referred the water droplets as iWD (intelligent Water Droplets).
My thesis partner should be able to provide a very detailed technical explanation of the project. I am not going to go into that. Instead, I just wanted to share the story of my gradution days research thesis.
Thanks
DB
25th May 2026