Stanford Researchers Discover the 'Anternet' 133
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."
Has to be done (Score:5, Funny)
Anthill Inside (Score:2, Funny)
+++Out Of Cheese Error ???????+++ Redo from Start
Throttling bandwidth (Score:4, Funny)
Anthill inside (Score:4, Funny)
Thankfully... (Score:5, Funny)
Ants may have discovered TCP; but they are ignorant of the secret of aggressive litigation...
All fine and good... (Score:5, Funny)
...but the anternet is still a really buggy network
Bah (Score:4, Funny)
They may have invented TCP/IP, but not "on a computer". So I call this prior art invalid.
But how many ants would it take? (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.
Re:How close? (Score:5, Funny)
How close?
If only there were some way to know... such as reading the damned article.
Re:Anybody see the problem with this statement? (Score:5, Funny)
Now you're just arguing semANTics.
Re:All fine and good... (Score:5, Funny)
I also think in this case using RAID will not help protect your data.