Brain Storm Optimization

I have seen the name of this heuristic before. There is also a Hypo-Variance Brain Storm Optimization. Reading the abstract in [1] made me laugh again.

Of course a human is smarter than an ant or a bee, so this algorithm must work much better than Ant Colony or some Bee Based heuristic! Or as stated in the abstract:

Abstract. Human being is the most intelligent animal in this world. Intuitively, optimization algorithm inspired by human being creative problem solving process should be superior to the optimization algorithms inspired by collective behavior of insects like ants, bee, etc. In this paper, we introduce a novel brain storm optimization algorithm, which was inspired by the human brainstorming process. Two benchmark functions were tested to validate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed algorithm. 

Of course two test functions is more than enough.

In [2] a list of these type of heuristics is presented:

The "intelligent water drop" may be another top contender.

References

1. Y. Shi, “Brain storm optimization algorithm,” in Advances in Swarm Intelligence, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Y. Tan, Y. Shi, Y. Chai, and G. Wang, Eds. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, 2011, vol. 6728, pp. 303–309. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-21515-5_36
2. Iztok Fister Jr., Xin-She Yang, Iztok Fister, Janez Brest, Dusan Fister, A Brief Review of Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Optimization, http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4186