[charltones]

This bears a striking resemblance to the HN posting on antiobjects: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981738

(representing a pac-man game by having ghosts detect a "smell" of pac-man that diffuses through the maze)

[icefox]

This is of course the Ant Colony Optimization paper from 91 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization