Other Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

[J65nko]

From http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/a...et-082312.html

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."

[roddierod]

I don't know...may be the first ant to return say "damn there is a lot of food out there." and the boss ant send out more...why does it have to be so complex?

[jggimi]

From the article

So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed and scalable – the very qualities that we need in large engineered distributed systems," she said. "I think as we start understanding more about how species of ants regulate their behavior, we'll find many more useful applications for network algorithms.

From Wikipedia:

The successful techniques used by ant colonies have been studied in computer science and robotics to produce distributed and fault-tolerant systems for solving problems, for example Ant colony optimization and Ant robotics. This area of biomimetics has led to studies of ant locomotion, search engines that make use of "foraging trails", fault-tolerant storage, and networking algorithms.

It's the bee's knees. The bug's hugs. The fly's eyes. And any other insect erogenous zone you can think of.