Abstract

In recent years a considerable amount of natural computing research has been undertaken to exploit the analogy between, say, searching a given problem space for an optimal solution and the natural process of foraging for food. Such analogies have led to useful solutions in areas such as optimisation, prominent examples being ant colony systems and particle swarm optimisation. However, these solutions often rely on well defined fitness landscapes that are not always be available in more general search scenarios. This paper surveys a wide variety of behaviours observed within the natural world, and aims to highlight general cooperative group behaviours, search strategies and communication methods that might be useful within a wider computing context, beyond optimisation, where information from the fitness landscape may be sparse, but new search paradigms could be developed that capitalise on research into biological systems that have developed over millennia within the natural world.