[eXC3Kvnn]

...where nature, science and fiction combine.

http://engineering.stanford.edu/news...cover-anternet

It turns out that the TCP network mimics the behavior of Harvester ants - making way for the development of Hex.

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn't see any overlap between his and Gordon's work, but inspiration would soon strike.

"The next day it occurred to me, 'Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'" Prabhakar said. "The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol."

[replicaypu]

Hex is awesome.... If we're thinking of the same Hex....

[Gilowero]

total control of packet handling.

[Erexecike]

Hex is awesome.... If we're thinking of the same Hex....

oh, stop it with that magic..

[Imalaycle]

Deborah Gordon has a great book that describes the behavior (and her study) of harvester ants - a good read.

[bonyclayd]

Deborah Gordon has a great book that describes the behavior (and her study) of harvester ants - a good read.

"Book Description
Publication Date: October 6, 1999
A scientific tour de force, Deborah Gordon's "Ants at Work" takes us to the amazing world of an ant society and reveals a new and original understanding of how these tiny animals get the work of the colony done. Gordon's surprising and deceptively simple message that the queen is not in charge represents a fundamental shift in modern biology. It is no less than a revolution in our thinking on the mystery of natural organization.

Based on the author's seventeen years of research on harvester ants in the Arizona desert, "Ants at Work" overturns all standard ideas of insect society hierarchy. Gordon shows that an ant colony operates without any central control and that no ant has power over another. Yet the ant colony, harmoniously performs extremely complex tasks; including nest building, navigation, foraging, food storage, tending the young, garbage collection, and on occasion, even war. She shows that there are no territorial borders in the way we understand them because ants are always ready to change. Ants also switch from one task to another, which undermines the standard view that insect societies are run on a caste system. Gordon explores how ants use simple, local information to make the decisions that generate the complex behavior of colonies. New colonies are born, struggle to occupy a foraging area, grow larger, start to reproduce, and then settle in among their lifelong neighbors.

Superb drawings of ants and maps directly from Gordon's field notes enrich the experience of reading this breakthrough work. In these maps we discover what ants do when a neighboring colony disappears behind an enclosure and what they do when their neighbors suddenly reappear. We seewhere different tasks of ant daily life are performed. Through Gordon's wry sense of humor and lucid voice, we experience the delights and frustrations of spending blistering days in the desert between the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains of Arizona, pursuing the mystery of the fascinating behavior of "Pogonomyrmex."

By focusing on chaotic patterns of behavior instead of searching for fixed universal laws, Gordon signals the future of scientific investigation. She boldly contends that ant communication is a model of how brains, immune systems, and the natural world as a whole organize themselves. Her discoveries have profound implications for anyone who is interested in how organizations work, from biologists and physicists to business leaders and pioneers of cyberspace. "Ants at Work" brings to the natural world the insights of a new era in the science of life."



but I promised ... no more books.

[elapicearpisp]

Evolved ?

not likely

[bellson]

Evolved ?

not likely

Yes, very likely. You haven't gone all ID on us, have you?

[Dilangos]

"Book Description
Publication Date: October 6, 1999
Gordon's surprising and deceptively simple message that the queen is not in charge represents a fundamental shift in modern biology. It is no less than a revolution in our thinking on the mystery of natural organization.

Based on the author's seventeen years of research on harvester ants in the Arizona desert, "Ants at Work" overturns all standard ideas of insect society hierarchy. Gordon shows that an ant colony operates without any central control and that no ant has power over another.
(

Where "standard ideas" = sci-fi authors and screenwriters idea of hive organization, this is true. But actual scientists haven't thought of the queen of a hive as a central control for... Well, forever.

It's one of the (many) things which makes the Star Trek:the Next Generation episode _Best of Both Worlds_ so amazing: the writers actually depicted a hive accurately. Then came the movies and _voyager_ and the Borg Queen, and the writers started making the same mistakes as every other author of fiction who ever wrote about a hive species

[Beriilosal]

To include the actual points of scientific interest from link, /*

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.

This 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 data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

*/ .


Evolutionary design of a simple robust algorithm seems unsurprising, even if it is elegant in being simple and robust.

[jeepgrandch]

To include the actual points of scientific interest from link, /*

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.

This 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 data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

*/ .


Evolutionary design of a simple robust algorithm seems unsurprising, even if it is elegant in being simple and robust.

Your points appear to be intersting in an engineering sense, but I can't see how a forced analogy is relevant scientifically. Would you please expand on the quoted post?