Adult great spotted cuckoos, Clamator glandariusdamage the eggs of their magpie, Pica picahost without removing or eating them. The number of damaged magpie eggs was recorded in 360 parasitized nests of which 62.2% contained between one and eight damaged magpie eggs. Egg-destroying behaviour may be adaptive if it reduces nestling competition and/or enhances the hatching success of the cuckoo. T...

Cuckoo eggs famously mimic those of their foster parents to evade rejection from discriminating hosts. Here we test whether parasites benefit by repeatedly parasitizing the same host nest. This should make accurate rejection decisions harder, regardless of the mechanism that hosts use to identify foreign eggs. Here we find strong support for this prediction in the African tawny-flanked prinia (...

Today, the information is growing enormously and it is difficult and tedious task to retrieve the necessary information from that pool. The main area for retrieving relevant answers is called intelligent information retrieval. To achieve this, question and answering system is used. This question and answering plays a major role in user query processing, information retrieval and extracting rela...

Training neural networks is a complex task that is important for supervised learning. A few metaheuristic optimization techniques have been applied to increase the effectiveness of the training process. The Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm is a recently developed meta-heuristic optimization algorithm which is suitable for solving optimization problems. In this paper, Cuckoo search is implemented in...

Nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithms are iterative search processes which find near optimal solutions by efficiently performing exploration and exploitation of the solution space. Considering the solution space in a specified region, this work compares performances of Bat, Cuckoo search and Firefly algorithms for unconstrained optimization problems. Global optima are found using various te...

Economic Load Dispatch problem (ELD) is one of the most important optimization problems in power system operation and planning. This paper introduces a solution to ELD problem using a new metaheuristic natureinspired algorithm called Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA). The proposed approach has been applied to various systems. This algorithm is based on the obligate brood parasitic behavior of some ...

Cuckoo search (CS) is a novel biologically inspired algorithm and has been widely applied to many fields. Although some binary-coded CS variants are developed to solve 0-1 knapsack problems, the search accuracy and the convergence speed are still needed to further improve. According to the analysis of the shortcomings of the standard CS and the advantage of the global harmony search (GHS), a no...

How do parents recognize their offspring when the cost of making a recognition error is high? Avian brood parasite-host systems have been used to address this question because of the high cost of parasitism to host fitness. We discovered that superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) females call to their eggs, and upon hatching, nestlings produce begging calls with key elements from their mother's "...

Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm developed by Xing-she Yang and Suash Deb in 2009. This paper explores the various research work done in application of Cuckoo Search algorithm in optimization of geometry, processes, signals and systems in real world engineering problems. Various researchers have applied Cuckoo Search algorithm in the following broad domains...