Bacteria Foraging Optimization

Abstract

Natural selection tends to eliminate animals with poor “foraging strategies” (methods for locating, handling, and ingesting food) and favor the propagation of genes of those animals that have successful foraging strategies since they are more likely to enjoy reproductive success (they obtain enough food to enable them to reproduce). After many generations, poor foraging strategies are either eliminated or shaped into good ones. Such evolutionary principles have led scientists to hypothesize that it is appropriate to model the activity of foraging as an optimization process. In this chapter, we first explain the biology and physics underlying the chemotactic (foraging) behavior of E. coli bacteria. Next, we introduce an algorithmic optimization model of E. coli foraging behavior. Finally, we show that this algorithm can perform optimization for a multiple-extremum function minimization problem.