Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Cuckoo search is a population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm that models the brood parasitism of certain cuckoo species, which lay their eggs in the nests of other host birds. Each candidate solution is represented as an egg in a nest, and the algorithm iteratively replaces some of the worse nests with new solutions generated by Levy flights, a random walk whose step lengths are drawn from a heavy tailed distribution that occasionally takes a very large step, letting the search explore distant regions of the solution space rather than only wandering locally; a nest's egg can also be abandoned and replaced entirely with some fixed probability, modeling a host bird discovering and rejecting a parasitic egg. Xin-She Yang and Suash Deb introduced the algorithm in 2009, noting that it needs only a single tunable parameter beyond its population size, which makes it comparatively simple to implement next to related algorithms such as particle swarm optimization or harmony search, and later analysis has shown it to behave as a special case of the established evolution strategy family of optimization methods.