What the Internet has in common with an ant colony

[murbard2]

This is an old project http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ but the idea is still sound. It's routing inspired by ant colonies, for anonymous file sharing.

See http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml for an explanation of the algorithm

[danso]

Ants and their colonies are so fascinating to me that I'm constantly saddened by Maxis's decision to not remake SimAnt. I'd be happy with a SimBee, too.

[sanoli]

I don't know about SimBee (not into bees as I'm into ants I guess), but I would love a new SimAnt.

[DanAndersen]

Ant colony systems are really interesting! It's fascinating how distributed creatures can communicate and, with a simple set of rules, converge on a good solution.

Last year I did a GPU programming project involving an ant-colony-like simulation. Based on the idea that ants have immediate knowledge only of their neighborhood, it's a simulation that works well with GPU fragment-shader-based parallelization:

http://www.dan.andersen.name/gpu-accelerated-3d-ant-colony-s...

https://github.com/DanAndersen/gpu-ant-sim

[LiweiZ]

You may be interested in complex system and complex adaptive system as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system

I think they are the source perspective of many ideas. And many popular books are actually derived from them.

[leephillips]

Ant colonies can also solve variational calculus problems: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/have-a-scientific-pro...

In other news, this article uses "comprise" to mean the opposite of what it actually means, which is the subject of another of today's HN front page articles: https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-1...

[jnaour]

There is several optimization algorithms that are inspired by nature. Especially Ant Colony Optimization.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Swarm_intelligence

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithm...

[Panamfrank]

The article seems to be written from the perspective where we somehow weren't born from the same evolutionary processes as ants.

[wiredfool]

I'd tell y'all a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

[mnem]

In that case, I'll just keep telling you this TCP joke until you do get it.