Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Researchers Discover the 'Anternet'
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."
They have known this for years. In fact some of the original researched used ant farms to do this...
Interesting rediscovery...
ummm.... I do believe there were some seminal works during the pre-BT days regarding ant routing -- http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml.
while that has more to do with routing than congestion avoidance, I would hope that your average network engineer knows that ants have the EEs beaten cold.
Formic post!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior
How close?
They talking about a full implementation of RFC 5681 with all 4 schemes and all the bells and whistles, or just some trendy popular science stuff with "well, there seems to be ACKs".
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5681 (not a rickroll, I promise)
I suppose a RFC 5681 loss recovery mechanism would be something like what happens when you step on an ant. ssthresh TCP setting is like how many ants fit thru the hole at once when you agitate the colony with a stick? We could probably have a lot of fun doing "official slashdot ant analogies" instead of the more common "official slashdot car analogies"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
+++Out Of Cheese Error ???????+++ Redo from Start
"Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years," Prabhakar said.
Does anybody else see the problem with this statement?
I think it would have been better said "We have discovered an algorithm that ant know well."
21st Century Renaissance Man
I suppose an anteater is used to stop ant torrents. Or would that be a DOS attack?
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.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
is THC - influenced.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ants may have discovered TCP; but they are ignorant of the secret of aggressive litigation...
...but the anternet is still a really buggy network
I think it would have been better said "We have discovered an algorithm that ant know well."
Obviously you're a pro-Formic shill. The International Fleet will not tolerate this kind of sympathy. Your post has been reported to Commander Hyrum Graff!
My work here is dung.
They may have invented TCP/IP, but not "on a computer". So I call this prior art invalid.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
...And some (i.e the army ants) also practice a form of Denial of Service Attacks when they carry out massive raids over a specific area, denying food for other colonies.
They also wage wars of annihilation where weaker colonies are wiped out. But that's another story and the algorithm is way simpler.
Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision... way more disturbing than Sir Pratchett...
This one really is just a series of tubes
mod me funny
I, for once, welcome this powerful tactical insight to rebel against our new insect overlords.
I honestly didn't see a lot of substance here.
Instead of saying ants use TCP, I would say ants and TCP both use common sense.
When I apply for jobs, I contact friends in my network. If someone gets back to me faster, I reply back faster and send my resume to them quickly. Does that mean I am following TCP/IP?
I mean, if apple can patent rectangles, this one should be a cinch to get through the courts. Welcome your new ant masters! All your sugar cubes are belong to us.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
PLoS Computational Biology does not have issues, it publishes continually as an online-only journal. People will also notice when clicking on the link to the abstract that they can view the full article for free, from anywhere, no paywall restrictions of any sort.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought that TCP was largely influenced by the behavior of ants. So the only surprise with this discovery to me is that those researchers seem to be oblivious to that fact
I always wondered what do they do and how they forage for foods. I never thought they knew TCP! Fascinating. On the one hand, when I understood TCP first time, the protocol seems more reasonable and choreography for data congestion seems intuitive. But if ants could think the same way as human, my opinion of ants' intelligence is changing.
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.
Hank Pym's super ants got out of the lab again.
which does seem to be a far cry from TCP. While common lore (and the modern buffer bloated internet) has it that high RTT means little available bandwidth (and it sure does play havoc with the bandwidth product - giving rise to that lore fairly) - the design calls for packet drop rather than delay to indicate a link being overloaded. And while the source slows down - it does not actually throttles; it just awaits the ack - it wont slow down the next packets. It is just that the window won't grow further. So makes one think of the observations in RFC-2488.
Happy Monday
I follow the Discordian calendar, you insensitive clod! Today is Prickle-Prickle.
Yeah the Anternet is awesome and all but the ping time is crap. I tried playing CS on it and with the horrible ping time everything was just unplayable and then one of them wandered into my power supply and fried my PC.
At the risk of sounding stupid without reading anything, may I predict that they discovered something trivial or tautological, or otherwise useless like "fractals", "power law", "criticality", etc. etc etc...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
My kitchen is full of ants! I need a firewall and a better router.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Does nobody read discworld any more? Where ants act as bits in a magical computer?
Paai
Prickle-Prickle, the 20th day of Bureaucracy in the YOLD 3178 to be precise. (For those who haven't, try 'ddate' on any *nix system...)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Call Al Gore! We need an on-ramp to the ant-formation superhighway.
Vision with execution is hallucination.
I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords
A pro Forma post. Look at the ant shill.
You might want to check the PhD of this guy in 1998 entitled "Ant Colony Optimization and its application to adaptive routing in telecommunication networks".
There are plenty of other ant like heuristics to network routing even older than this. Ant behavior modelization dates as far as 1989 (from J-L. Deneubourg), and routing was the first practical application for the derivative algorithms.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
2 species, on the same planet int the same general point in history come up with a similar process for a similar problem. *yawn*
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Please pick up the phone at the ant counter.
It's another example of us trying to think about optimum strategies and then finding that nature, through millions or billions of years of trial-and-error, has come up with almost the same solutions.
One example is with sea-slug procreation. Certain sea-slugs can change their sex, but they can't do it in the heat of the moment, apparently. They have to decide what to be ahead of time. The technique they use is to become the sex opposite of the last other slug they came across... and it turns out that this also is the optimal solution to the classic "prisoner's dilemma" game-theory problem.
Another example is in computer networking. With Ethernet, when you have something to send, you listen on the wires to see if any other card is transmitting. If not, you start sending. If you notice another card start sending at the same time, you both stop and wait a random amount of time, and then check to see if anyone else is transmitting, etc. It turns out that this is exactly how humans converse in small groups. You wait until nobody's talking, and then open your mouth to speak. If you get a "collision" (where someone else started talking at the same time), then both people shut up and look at each other, and, usually, one will resume talking first. Every now and then, you'll get repeated collisions and then everybody start laughing and they pass the Cheetos.
When you get too many devices on the network, and traffic gets too high, then collisions become a big issue (this was before the days of switched hubs, people). You couldn't have devices just transmitting whenever they wanted because the odds of colliding with another transmission was too high. So, they came up with Token-Ring, where each device is given it's "turn" to transmit on the network, and then it passes its permission to the next one. It turns out that humans do this, too, when groups get so large that everyone would be interrupting and colliding. For example "The floor now recognizes the distinguished gentleman from Missouri", or "Mr. Speaker, I know relinquish the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Iowa...".
Some would view these similarities as "Hey... nature ain't so stupid!", but I view it the other way... that our thought-out method is probably pretty close to the optimal solution (either that or trapped in a local maxima along with the ants and slugs).
It's obvious the ants reverse-engineered our protocol - we demand US$1Bn for such blatant piracy.
does this mean we have to pay them the copyright
There is also research to suggest that ants connect colonies together using Steiner trees, which are related to minimum cost spanning trees. Network engineers are familiar with these since they're used in the protocol of the same name to prevent layer 2 loops. Now we discover they have a TCP-like throttling mechanism. Next we'll decode a colony as HTTP and figure out they're just playing farmville.
Also: Deborah Gordon (one of the authors of the paper) has an enjoyable book on her harvester ant research called "Ants at work: how an insect society is organized". In it, she talks about other forms of ant communication at a colony level and on an ant-to-ant level. This research isn't in the book since the book is older. Recommended if you have an interest in ants and their colonies and don't know where to start. Check your local library.