Does the Field of Nature-Inspired Computing Contribute to Achieving Lifelike Features?

The main idea behind artificial intelligence was simple: what if we study living systems to develop new, practical computing systems that possess "lifelike" properties? And that's exactly how evolutionary computing emerged. Researchers came up with ideas inspired by the principles of evolution to develop intelligent methods to tackle hard problems. The efficacy of these methods made researchers seek inspiration in living organisms and systems and extend the evolutionary concept to other nature-inspired ideas. In recent years, nature-inspired computing has exhibited an exponential increase in the number of algorithms that are presented each year. Authors claim that they are inspired by a behavior found in nature to come up with a lifelike algorithm. However, the mathematical background does not match the behavior in the majority of these cases. Thus the question is, do all nature-inspired algorithms remain lifelike? Also, are there any ideas included that contribute to computing? This study aims to (a) present some nature-inspired methods that contribute to achieving lifelike features of computing systems and (b) discuss if there is any need for new lifelike features.

Real operational data for the concrete delivery problem.

The data article describes a real operational dataset for the Concrete Delivery Problem (CDP). The dataset consists of 263 instances corresponding to daily orders of concrete from construction sites in Quebec, Canada. A concrete producer, i.e., a concrete-producing company that delivers concrete, provided the raw data. We cleaned the data by removing entries corresponding to non-complete orders. We processed these raw data to form instances useful for benchmarking optimization algorithms developed to solve the CDP. We also anonymized the published dataset by removing any client information and addresses corresponding to production or construction sites. The dataset is useful for researchers and practitioners studying the CDP. It can be processed to create artificial data for variations of the CDP. In its current form, the data contain information about intra-day orders. Thus, selected instances from the dataset are useful for CDP's dynamic aspect considering real-time orders.

A comprehensive database of Nature-Inspired Algorithms.

These data contain a comprehensive collection of all Nature-Inspired Algorithms. This collection is a result of two corresponding surveys, where all Nature-Inspired Algorithms that have been published to-date were gathered and preliminary data acquired. The rapidly increasing number of nature-inspired approaches makes it hard for interested researchers to keep up. Moreover, a proper taxonomy is necessary, based on specific features of the algorithms. Different taxonomies and useful insight into the application areas that the algorithms have coped with is given through these data. This article provides a detailed description of the above mentioned collection.