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Ants Build Cheapest Networks
schliz writes "When building a network from scratch, Argentine ants tend to connect their nests in the way that, while more inconvenient for individual ants, requires the minimum amount of trail. Researchers studying 'supercolonies' of the ants found them building networks that closely resembled the mathematical shortest path — a Steiner tree. They hope to apply their work to self-healing, organic computing networks of self-organising sensors, robots, computers, and autonomous cars." This story adds to the earlier report of ants' networking prowess.
Are you sure someone actually designed the walkways?
When the University I attended built a new extension or building, they would intentionally NOT install pavement walkways between the new building and anything around it. Instead they installed grass and waited ~six months for the students/professors to collectively define the necessary paths to and from the building. The University would then install the pavement, routing them to match the paths worn into the grass. This yielded some interesting walkways but they always seemed to make sense.
My MS thesis was right up this alley; titled "Automated Radio Network Design Using Ant Colony Optimization"
We represented the network design problem as a GSTS (generalized Steiner tree-star) problem, and programmatically let thousands of ants traverse the network looking for optimal designs.
Here's the final thesis paper, a conference poster, and thesis defense presentation for anyone interested:
http://jsharkey.org/thesis-draft2.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/downloads/trb-jsharkey.pdf/poster-jsharkey.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/
Oh, and we also open-sourced it under GPLv3:
http://libprop.jsharkey.org/
http://code.google.com/p/libprop/
http://code.google.com/p/aco-netdesign/