In recent years, a great deal of research interest has grown in nature-inspired computing, that is, computing involving the fundamental concepts of physics, chemistry, and biology. The discipline is now quite mature and established. Siddique and Adeli’s book is a comprehensive treatise on the subject with real-life engineering applications.

The book has ten chapters. Chapter 1, “Dialects of Nature Inspiration for Computing,” is introductory. The subtopics include a brief history of natural sciences, traditional approaches to search and optimization, and algorithms based on physics, chemistry, and biology. Chapter 2 focuses on gravitational search algorithms. Chapters 3 and 4 cover central force optimization and electromagnetism-like optimization, respectively. The other topics dealt with in the book include harmony search (chapter 5), the water drop algorithm (chapter 6), the spiral dynamics algorithm (chapter 7), simulated annealing (chapter 8), chemical reaction optimization (chapter 9), and finally miscellaneous algorithms (chapter 10). Each chapter provides the reader with engineering applications of the algorithms discussed therein. The last chapter deserves a special mention as it includes a wide variety of interesting and useful algorithms, such as the black hole algorithm, integrated radiation optimization, charged system search, and the external optimization algorithm, to name a few. This is followed by a lucid bibliography and notes on vectors and matrices, random numbers, chaotic maps, optimization, and the probability distribution function, spread over appendices A to E, respectively.

The target readership includes both students--undergraduate as well as postgraduate--and researchers in engineering, business, economics, and computing science. The prerequisite is adequate knowledge of calculus, differential equations, and optimization techniques.

I enjoyed reading this book and would definitely recommend it for any scientific library.