What the Internet has in common with an ant colony (opens in new tab)

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

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.

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

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...

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...

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

I'd tell y'all a UDP joke, but you might not get it.