stoilis writes "A collaboration between Deborah Gordon, a
Stanford ant biologist, and Balaji Prabhakar, 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. From the article: 'Prabhakar wrote an ant
algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount
of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon's experiments
manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford
student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced
algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in
Gordon's experiments. "Ants have discovered an algorithm that we
know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years,"
Prabhakar said.' The abstract is published in the Aug. 23 issue
of PLoS Computational Biology."