abc-rs

Karaboga's Artificial Bee Colony in Rust (now in parallel!)

Documentation is now available.

The Algorithm

The Artificial Bee Colony is an optimization algorithm. It considers a set of solution candidates by sending conceptual "bees" to work on those solutions. There are three kinds of bee:

• One worker bee is dedicated to each solution. Each time a worker bee runs, it looks at a solution near the current one, keeping each improvement.
• Observer bees are like workers, but are not dedicated to a single solution. Instead, they look at all of the active solutions and choose one randomly to work on. Observers usually prefer to work on higher-fitness solutions.
• A worker or observer whose solution appears to be a local maximum becomes a scout. Scouting entails generating a new, random solution to break out of a rut.

What Can Bees Do For You

The ABC algorithm can be -- and has been -- applied to a variety of applications. As with many such algorithms, the logic is fairly agnostic about the domain that it works in. In fact, the prerequisites for using the algorithm are:

• a data structure with a solution,
• a way of generating new, random solutions,
• a way of generating solutions "near" an existing solution, and
• a fitness function to score solutions.

A solution could be a game-playing AI, a blueprint for a building, or just a point in space, and the abc crate treats them all alike. Simply implement the Solution trait for a type of your choice, construct a Hive, and start running.

Synchronous and Asynchronous Running

Speaking of running,abc supports two run modes:

• running for a fixed number of rounds and returning the best solution, or
• running continuously in the background and sending each improved solution over a Rust channel.

Parallelism

The abc crate takes advantage of Rust's excellent concurrency support to explore the same space. This means that heavy computation can be distributed across multiple CPU cores, or I/O-bound evaluation can run without blocking. The hive maintains a queue of bees, and the threads each take bees from the queue and apply the bees' logic to the solutions. So, at pretty much any given moment, there is a different bee working in each thread.