Cohort Intelligence: A Self Supervised Learning Behavior

By virtue of the collective and interdependent behavior of its candidates, a swarm organizes itself to achieve a particular task. Similarly, inspired from the natural and social tendency of learning from one another, a novel concept of Cohort Intelligence (CI) is presented. The learning refers to a cohort candidate's effort to self supervise its behavior and further adapt to the behavior of other candidate which it intends to follow. This makes every candidate to improve/evolve its own and eventually the entire cohort behavior. The approach is validated by solving four test problems. The advantages and limitations are also discussed.