Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

[hunter]

Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and 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.

By Bjorn Carey

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."

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.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/ants-mimic-internet-082312.html

[xchrom]

1. du rec. Nt

[Jim__]

2. That raises an interesting question about design methodology.

From the article:

Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.

A quick read of the history of the development of TCP/IP indicates that it was developed iteratively, addressing problems as they occurred - an excerpt:

...

TCP/IP was initially designed to meet the data communication needs of the
U.S. Department of Defence (DOD).

In the late 1960s the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now called
DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defence began a partnership with U.S.
universities and the corporate research community to design open, standard
protocols and build multi-vendor networks.

Together, the participants planned ARPANET, the first packet switching
network. The first experimental four-node version of ARPANET went into
operation in 1969. These four nodes at three different sites were connected
together via 56 kbit/s circuits, using the Network Control Protocol (NCP). The
experiment was a success, and the trial network ultimately evolved into a useful
operational network, the "ARPA Internet".

In 1974, the design for a new set of core protocols, for the ARPANET, was
proposed in a paper by Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. The official name
for the set of protocols was TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite, commonly referred
to as TCP/IP, which is taken from the names of the network layer protocol
(Internet protocol [IP]) and one of the transport layer protocols (Transmission
Control Protocol [TCP]).

...

My thought is that the method used for the design and development of TCP/IP is preferable to a method that attempts to extrapolate an algorithm from a system that is developed in response to a different problem.

[hunter]

3. I'd say the networks developed in a similar fashion.

Ants evolved, in essence developed iteratively, addressing problems as they occurred...