Hacker News Reader

Comment by alblue | Hacker News Reader

Discovery of TCP/IP is a significant overstatement. The ants perform flow control based on the number and frequency of ants returning from a known source.

They of course have no concept of out-of-order delivery, retransmitting lost ants or even having to deal with ants accidentally duplicated as they walk their paths.

View on HN

> retransmitting lost ants

That's not an issue to ants and their problem.

Actually it is. The article seems to describe an algorithm with a catastrophic failure mode where no (or not enough) ants return. Without retransmission the ants just hang around waiting for a returning ant. So there must be some sort of retransmission.

With no retransmission you limit the number of dead ants though. If you continue to send ants you're going to get lots of dead ants in certain situations, so you'd need a more complex algorithm than simple retransmission.

The wait-state is an interesting adaptation, I have wondered about the small ants that invade my house, they don't appear to have any kind of similar requirement. Which does lead to a lot of ant death (I feel bad about it, but I don't want them getting into my food). Which has always struck me as maladaptive - to recover a few calories of crumbs, the colony will send hundreds of ants in, yet I am sure that growing those workers took more resources than they bring back. It may be that in nature there aren't any similar situations (for these ants, at least - no anteaters in North America).

I doubt that ants care about one of them dissapearing?

They try to optimise food-collection and their algo seems quite performant there. No? They won't wait for an ant endless but they won't go searching for it neither (like someone else explained it here)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com