News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by murbard2 on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:56PM (#8994088)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by danso on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:52PM (#8994070)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by sanoli on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:26PM (#8994284)
I don't know about SimBee (not into bees as I'm into ants I guess), but I would love a new SimAnt.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by spiritplumber on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:43PM (#8994364)
There's a French game called Empire of the Ants that came out circa 2002, that is intended to be a spiritual successor.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by DanAndersen on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:52PM (#8994650)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by LiweiZ on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @09:56PM (#8995078)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by leephillips on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:11PM (#8994485)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by jnaour on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @07:45AM (#8996490)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by Panamfrank on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @02:07AM (#8995686)
The article seems to be written from the perspective where we somehow weren't born from the same evolutionary processes as ants.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by wiredfool on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:58PM (#8994105)
I'd tell y'all a UDP joke, but you might not get it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by mnem on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:03PM (#8994133)
In that case, I'll just keep telling you this TCP joke until you do get it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What the Internet has in common with an ant colony by 0xdeadbeefbabe on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:04PM (#8994148)
I acknowledge you; go ahead.
[ Parent | on HN ]