An interesting computer security project has been underway at Wake Forest University.  They have been developing threat detection software that mimics the behavior of ants.

About a decade ago I read the book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) which, among other things, went into detail about the pherenome trail left by ants.  The ants would go out on discovery missions, looking for food, leaving in their wake a scent trail.  If a place of interest was discovered, the scout would return back on the same trail, making it stronger, and other ants would begin to follow this same path, each traversal making the trail that much stronger.  The stronger the scent, the more interest it was to the other ants in the colony.  That's why when you see a pile of ants on a piece of food on the ground, there is usually only a single path leading to and from.

Similarly, "as [the digital ants] move about the network, they leave digital trails modeled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection."

We have a lot to learn from nature.  There are many problems evolution has already solved for us, "burned in" over thousands of centuries.  It takes creative minds like these students to emulate behaviors found in nature to solve today's technical challenges.




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