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Matthew Russell, John A. Clark, Susan Stepney.
Using Ants to Attack a Classical Cipher.

In E. Cantú-Paz, J. A. Foster, K. Deb, L. D. Davis, R. Roy, U.-M. O'Reilly, H.-G. Beyer, R. Standish, G. Kendall, S. Wilson, M. Harman, J. Wegener, D. Dasgupta, M. A. Potter, A. C. Schultz, K. A. Dowsland, N. Jonoska, J. Miller (eds). Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference: GECCO 2003, Chicago, USA, July 2003 . LNCS vol 2723, pp. 146--147. Springer, 2003

[ poster paper ]

Introduction:

Transposition ciphers are a class of historical encryption algorithms based on rearranging units of plaintext according to some fixed permutation which acts as the secret key. Transpositions form a building block of modern ciphers, and applications of metaheuristic optimisation techniques to classical ciphers have preceded successful results on modern-day cryptological problems. In this paper we describe the use of Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) for the automatic recovery of the key, and hence the plaintext, from only the ciphertext.

Full paper : Postscript 70K 

@inproceedings(SS-GECCO-03a,
  author = "Matthew Russell and John A. Clark and Susan Stepney",
  title = "Using Ants to Attack a Classical Cipher",
  pages = "146--147",
  crossref = "GECCO-03I",
  note = "poster paper"
)

@proceedings(GECCO-03I,
  title = "Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference:
           GECCO 2003, Chicago, USA, July 2003",
  booktitle = "Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference:
               GECCO 2003, Chicago, USA, July 2003",
  editor = "E. Cant{\'{u}}-Paz and J. A. Foster and K. Deb and L. D. Davis
            and R. Roy and U.-M. O'Reilly and H.-G. Beyer and R. Standish
            and G. Kendall and S. Wilson and M. Harman and J. Wegener
            and D. Dasgupta and M. A. Potter and A. C. Schultz
            and K. A. Dowsland and N. Jonoska and J. Miller",
  series = "LNCS",
  number = 2723,
  publisher = "Springer",
  year = 2003
)