photo by SweetCrisis
The Bees Algorithm is a nature-inspired search method that mimics the foraging behaviour of honey bees. It was created by Prof. D.T. Pham and his co-workers in 2005 [1], and described in its standard formulation by Pham and Castellani [2].
The algorithm uses a population of agents (artificial bees) to sample the solution space. A fraction of the population (scout bees) searches randomly for regions of high fitness (global search). The most successful scouts recruit a variable number of idle agents (forager bees) to search in the proximity of the fittest solutions (local search). Cycles of global and local search are repeated until an acceptable solution is discovered, or a given number of iterations have elapsed.
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