Ants use TCP-like communication, discover Stanford Researchers

Two Stanford researchers, an ant biologist, and a computer scientist have found that harvester ants on the hunt for food, use method, similar to that of the protocols used to control traffic on the Internet.

How the discovery was made:

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, have been studying ants for more than 20 years. Gordon observed that the harvester ant colonies were sending out more ants to get food. She contacted another Stanford researcher Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network.

When Prabhakar saw the particular ant behaviour, he found it almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file. In simple, The algorithm (mathematical model) the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). --------

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