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Stanford Researchers Discover the 'Anternet'

Posted by samzenpus on from the ant-power dept.

stoilis writes "A collaboration between Deborah Gordon, a Stanford ant biologist, and Balaji Prabhakar, a computer scientist, has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants, as they forage for food, mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. From the article: 'Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon's experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon's experiments. "Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years," Prabhakar said.' The abstract is published in the Aug. 23 issue of PLoS Computational Biology."

11 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Has to be done by paiute · · Score: 4, Funny

    Formic post!

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    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  2. Anthill Inside by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    +++Out Of Cheese Error ???????+++ Redo from Start

  3. Throttling bandwidth by tomhath · · Score: 3, Funny

    I suppose an anteater is used to stop ant torrents. Or would that be a DOS attack?

  4. Anthill inside by Jade_Wayfarer · · Score: 4, Funny

    And yet again, Sir Terry Pratchett is making me speechless with his insights. Now, it's almost like something is taking its pleasure in making a real-life citations from his books.

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    Absence of proof != proof of absence.
  5. Thankfully... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ants may have discovered TCP; but they are ignorant of the secret of aggressive litigation...

  6. All fine and good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...but the anternet is still a really buggy network

    1. Re:All fine and good... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      I also think in this case using RAID will not help protect your data.

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      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  7. Bah by StripedCow · · Score: 3, Funny

    They may have invented TCP/IP, but not "on a computer". So I call this prior art invalid.

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    If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
  8. But how many ants would it take? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sounds very impractical. I mean, even if you could get enough ants to carry the standard station wagon full of tapes, they're still not going to attain highway speeds.

  9. Re:How close? by N0Man74 · · Score: 4, Funny

    How close?

    If only there were some way to know... such as reading the damned article.

  10. Re:Anybody see the problem with this statement? by InlawBiker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now you're just arguing semANTics.