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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."

19 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. 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
  3. How close? by vlm · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      How close?

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

  4. Anybody see the problem with this statement? by thomasw_lrd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
    1. Re:Anybody see the problem with this statement? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think it would have been better said "We have discovered an algorithm that ant know well."

      Arguably, unless 'knowing' is something that you can do with substantially less nervous system than we expect, it might be more apt to think of ants as being capable of executing an algorithm, rather than 'knowing' it. By way of example, even children who haven't had a day of math in their lives, and are totally ignorant of the physics describing the trajectories of objects near the earth's surface can still catch a ball you toss to them most of the time(and sending them off to physics class is hardly the most efficient way of improving their performance...)

    2. Re:Anybody see the problem with this statement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Arguably, unless 'knowing' is something that you can do with substantially less nervous system than we expect, it might be more apt to think of ants as being capable of executing an algorithm, rather than 'knowing' it.

      The ant executes the algorithm. The colony knows the algorithm. (It's embedded in the colony's firmware, implemented in ants. Just as the sort of real-time calculus required to catch a ball is embedded in primate DNA, implemented in neurons.)

    3. Re:Anybody see the problem with this statement? by VortexCortex · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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?

      To be fair, the ants implemented the algorithm first, ergo: Nature discovered it first. Or, if you'd rather not personify the cosmos: Such protocols are naturally emergent.

      Most of what we're now learning and formalizing was discovered by nature millions of years ago. Slime molds can solve traffic patterns too. Pine cones "know" the Fibonacci sequence (at an intimate level). Fast Fourier Transforms are how our brains filter signals for certain kinds of pattern recognition. Holograms are macro scale demonstrations of reality at the quantum level. Neural networks can think (well duh). Life, as we know it, is merely a fractal expansion of DNA.

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

      Now you're just arguing semANTics.

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

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

  6. 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.

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

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

  8. 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.

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

    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.
  10. Common sense? by kgskgs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  11. PLoS Computational Biology by damn_registrars · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  12. 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.

  13. Hmm - is this really like TCP by dirkx · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From the article:

    .. feedback loop allows TCP [to run][ congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles...

    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.