Where can I learn more about “ant colony” optimizations?

Question

I\'ve been reading things here and there for a while now about using an \"ant colony\" model as a heuristic approach to optimizing various types of algorithms. However, I have

Answer 1

At first glance this seems to be closely related to (or prehaps a special case of) the Metropolis algorithm. So that's another possible direction for searching.

Addition: This PDF file includes a reference to the original Metropolis paper from 1953.