

What the Internet has in common with an ant colony - dmpatierno
http://priceonomics.com/the-independent-discovery-of-tcpip-by-ants/

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murbard2
This is an old project [http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/](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](http://mute-
net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml) for an explanation of the algorithm

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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.

~~~
spiritplumber
There's a French game called Empire of the Ants that came out circa 2002, that
is intended to be a spiritual successor.

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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...](http://www.dan.andersen.name/gpu-accelerated-3d-ant-colony-
simulation-and-visualization/)

[https://github.com/DanAndersen/gpu-ant-
sim](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_system)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_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.

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leephillips
Ant colonies can also solve variational calculus problems:
[http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/have-a-scientific-
pro...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/have-a-scientific-problem-
steal-an-answer-from-nature/)

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...](https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-
wikignome-10508842caad)

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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/Swarm_intelligence)

[http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithm...](http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms)

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

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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.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
I acknowledge you; go ahead.

