Simulated Bee Colony

This is a port of the sample code from James McCaffrey's MSDN Article: Natural Algorithms - Use Bee Colony Algorithms to Solve Impossible Problems.

The article is based on C# - but was written to be easily ported to other languages.

Installation

Prerequisites:

1. Make sure Node & NPM are installed.
2. Install global dependencies:
   Typescript: npm install -g typescript
   TS-Node: npm install -g ts-node

Clone Repository:

git clone https://github.com/kevinsherman/SimulatedBeeColony

Install package dependencies:

• cd SimulatedBeeColony
• npm install

Run Sample Application

Open a terminal/console and run npm start.

All of the variables you will want to edit are in the main function at the bottom of the file.

    var totalNumberBees : number = 100;
    var numberInactive : number = 20;
    var numberActive : number = 50;
    var numberScout : number = 30;
    var maxNumberVisits : number = 100;
    var maxNumberCycles : number = 3460; // <-- This usually needs to be increased to get a more accurate 'bestMeasureOfQuality' 

Go ahead and change maxNumberCycles to 50000 and see if you can get the optimal solution of 19.

Notes:

1. The 'test' method simply validates a few assumptions and prints to the console. The execution of this function is commented out - and is only for debugging purposes.
2. The 'main' method is where you can tweak the input parameters.
3. I made a slight tweak - and have the Solve() function return the number of iterations required to hit the known best MeasureOfQuality (19). Interestingly, sometimes it will find this value in less that 3,000 iterations - and other times, it will run through 50,000 iterations and not find it.

Pull Requests Welcome!

If I ported something incorrectly, or there is a better way to do this in Typescript, please let me know!