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Ants Build Cheapest Networks

Posted by timothy on from the where's-antdude-when-you-expect-him-most? dept.

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.

2 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Research on "Ant Colony Optimization" by jsharkey · · Score: -1, Redundant

    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/

  2. Research on Ant Colony Optimization by jsharkey · · Score: -1, Redundant

    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/