Optimization inspired by cooperative food retrieval in ants has been unexpectedly successful and has been known as ant colony
optimization (ACO) in recent years. One of the most important factors to improve the performance of the ACO algorithms is
the complex trade-off between intensification and diversification. This article investigates the effects of controlling the
diversity by adopting a simple mechanism for random selection in ACO. The results of computer experiments have shown that
it can generate better solutions stably for the traveling salesmen problem than ASrank which is known as one of the newest and best ACO algorithms by utilizing two types of diversity.
Key words Ant colony optimization - Diversity - Diversification - Intensification - Pheromone communication