Taxonomy

Harmony Search belongs to the fields of Computational Intelligence and Metaheuristics.

Inspiration

Harmony Search was inspired by the improvisation of Jazz musicians. Specifically, the process by which the musicians (who may have never played together before) rapidly refine their individual improvisation through variation resulting in an aesthetic harmony.

Strategy

The information processing objective of the technique is to use good candidate solutions already discovered to influence the creation of new candidate solutions toward locating the problems optima. This is achieved by stochastically creating candidate solutions in a step-wise manner, where each component is either drawn randomly from a memory of high-quality solutions, adjusted from the memory of high-quality solutions, or assigned randomly within the bounds of the problem. The memory of candidate solutions is initially random, and a greedy acceptance criteria is used to admit new candidate solutions only if they have an improved objective value, replacing an existing member.

Implementation

http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/physical/harmony_search.rb