So once again ant behaviour is being used to drive the protocols we rely on for the Internet. In a paper entitled ”The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information” researchers from Standford University have spotted a relationship between the way Harvester ants forage and the ubiquitous TCP. Of course TCP was designed back in the 1970s and the specific behaviours: slow start, congestion control, were later added as a result of network collapse. The ants have been using these general mechanisms for much longer.

Given that the relationship has only just been spotted its fair to say that neither ant nor human really inspired each other, but this is another example of evolution re-inventing itself over and over (for example, the eye is believed to have been independantly evolved 5 times across the evolutionary history.)

So, does this validate the approach, or mean thats its an optimal solution? No, not really, but it is always interesting to find parallels in the natural world to things we think that we have developed in cyberspace.