What the Internet has in common with an ant colony (priceonomics.com)

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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...