What the Internet has in common with an ant colony

http://priceonomics.com/the-independent-discovery-of-tcpip-by-ants/

by dmpatierno • 11 years ago

81 12 11 years ago

danso• 11 years ago

Ants and their colonies are so fascinating to me that I'm constantly saddened by Maxis's decision to not remake SimAnt. I'd be happy with a SimBee, too.

sanoli• 11 years ago

I don't know about SimBee (not into bees as I'm into ants I guess), but I would love a new SimAnt.

spiritplumber• 11 years ago

There's a French game called Empire of the Ants that came out circa 2002, that is intended to be a spiritual successor.

murbard2• 11 years ago

This is an old project http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ but the idea is still sound. It's routing inspired by ant colonies, for anonymous file sharing.

See http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml for an explanation of the algorithm

wiredfool• 11 years ago

I'd tell y'all a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

mnem• 11 years ago

In that case, I'll just keep telling you this TCP joke until you do get it.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 11 years ago

I acknowledge you; go ahead.

leephillips• 11 years ago

Ant colonies can also solve variational calculus problems: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/have-a-scientific-pro...

In other news, this article uses "comprise" to mean the opposite of what it actually means, which is the subject of another of today's HN front page articles: https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-1...

DanAndersen• 11 years ago

Ant colony systems are really interesting! It's fascinating how distributed creatures can communicate and, with a simple set of rules, converge on a good solution.

Last year I did a GPU programming project involving an ant-colony-like simulation. Based on the idea that ants have immediate knowledge only of their neighborhood, it's a simulation that works well with GPU fragment-shader-based parallelization:

http://www.dan.andersen.name/gpu-accelerated-3d-ant-colony-s...

https://github.com/DanAndersen/gpu-ant-sim

LiweiZ• 11 years ago

You may be interested in complex system and complex adaptive system as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system

I think they are the source perspective of many ideas. And many popular books are actually derived from them.

Panamfrank• 11 years ago

The article seems to be written from the perspective where we somehow weren't born from the same evolutionary processes as ants.

jnaour• 11 years ago

There is several optimization algorithms that are inspired by nature. Especially Ant Colony Optimization.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swarm_intelligence

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithm...

What the Internet has in common with an ant colony

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