Sex allocation theory and empirical evidence both suggest that natural selection should favour maternal control of offspring sex ratio in relation to their ability to invest in the offspring. Generalist parasites constitute a particularly interesting group to test this theory as different females commonly utilize different host species showing large variation in provisioning ability. The common...

Today’s world sees a lot of changes being done. These are a result of some modification or some innovation. This research is being done in the field of Swarm Intelligence or SI. It deals with studying the behaviour of organisms or swarms. Swarms are individual entities which are working on their own, yet their combined or aggregate behaviour yields some great results. This begins by studying th...

BACKGROUND Chicks of virulent brood parasitic birds eliminate their nestmates and avoid costly competition for foster parental care. Yet, efforts to evict nest contents by the blind and naked common cuckoo Cuculus canorus hatchling are counterintuitive as both adult parasites and large older cuckoo chicks appear to be better suited to tossing the eggs and young of the foster parents. METHODOL...

The Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) is one of the most interesting, studied, and difficult combinatorial optimization problems. That is why several approaches were developed for solving this problem, including exact approaches, heuristic approaches, metaheuristics, and hybrid approaches. This paper tries to solve the graph coloring problem using a discrete binary version of cuckoo search algorithm...

Coevolutionary arms races are a potent force in evolution, and brood parasite-host dynamics provide classical examples. Different host-races of the common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, lay eggs in the nests of other species, leaving all parental care to hosts. Cuckoo eggs often (but not always) appear to match remarkably the color and pattern of host eggs, thus reducing detection by hosts. However, ...

Specialization makes resource use more efficient and should therefore be a common process in animal evolution. However, this process is not as universal in nature as one might expect. Our study shows that Sphecodes (Halictidae) cuckoo bees frequently change their host over the course of their evolution. To test the evolutionary scenario of host specialization in cuckoo bees, we constructed well...

Because of computational drawbacks of conventional numerical methods in solving complex optimization problems, researchers may have to rely on meta-heuristic algorithms. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most widely used algorithms due to its simplicity of implementation and fast convergence speed. Also, the cuckoo search algorithm is a recently developed meta-heuristic optimizati...

The World Wide Web serves as a huge widely distributed global information service center. The tremendous amount of information on the web is improving day by day. So, the process of finding the relevant information on the web is a major challenge in Information Retrieval. This leads the need for the development of new techniques for helping users to effectively navigate, summarize and organize ...

The offspring of brood parasitic birds benefit from hatching earlier than host young. A proposed but little-known strategy to achieve this is 'internal incubation', by retaining the egg in the oviduct for an additional 24 h. To test this, we quantified the stage of embryo development at laying in four brood parasitic birds (European cuckoo, Cuculus canorus; African cuckoo, Cuculus gularis; grea...

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a powerful cryptographic building block that allows a program to provably hide its access patterns to sensitive data. Since the original proposal of ORAM by Goldreich and Ostrovsky, numerous improvements have been made. To date, the best asymptotic overhead achievable for general block sizes is O(logN/ log logN), due to an elegant scheme by Kushilevitz et al., which in t...