Thursday, September 24, 2009

Ants, Mushrooms, and the Internet

After posting about the TED talk that explains how the Internet works in easy to visualize metaphors, I remembered this other talk about how ant colonies function and realized it is very similar. So for your edification:



Pay particular attention to how data is sent from ant to ant and acted upon without a central decision center.


Mushroom researcher, Paul Stamets, believes that the Internet is a natural system, which is patterned after other natural systems:



As interesting as his comparison is, I find his research and work with fungi to be far more fascinating and full of potential for improving the world in general.

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