Re: Ant Farms versus Ant Communities

[Mordy Ovits <movits () bloomberg com>]

On Monday 15 December 2003 05:08 pm, Dave Aitel wrote:
> I want nanotechnology to get to the point where I can put a little
> transmitter in every ant in a colony, and study it from an information
> flow perspective. Somewhere in the two millimeters of ant is a program
> for doing cooperative transmission of information far better than Kazaa,
> that scales to billions of ants and can protect itself from outside
> interference. Perhaps we can build a FreeNet that works afterwards?

Richard Feynman, in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! wrote about 
his fascination with ants.  He spent a lot of time analyzing their behavior, 
and self-organization.  He would create a hypothesis about how they 
accomplished some complex behavior, and then devise a test for it.  
Typically, these tests involved him ferrying around ants on pieces of paper.  
Try to imagine a Nobel Prize-winning physicist carefully shuttling ants 
around his house.  I really wish I had known him.

Oh, and he also is the father of nanotechnology.  He lay the groundwork with 
his 1959 talk entitled There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.  Transcript of 
the talk:
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html

Mordy
-- 
Mordy Ovits
Network Security
Bloomberg L.P.

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