The Fruitfly is teaching boffins a thing or two about distributed computing. The boffins at Carniegie-Mellon University and Tel Aviv University have used the fruitfly to create new, performance-improving algorithms.

Your average fruitfly has a central nervous system like a distributed computing and wireless sensor networks. A certain number of cells take on leadership roles, handing down commands to the rest of the cells. The differences between the computer networks and the fruit flies comes down to the method in which processors or cells become leaders.

With the fruit fly nervous system, cells will evolve into a leadership role and emit a chemical preventing the surrounding cells from doing the same thing. The boffins have worked out how to do something similar with computer networks to work out which computers would issue commands.

It makes distributed networks go like the clappers. That is until they get a sniff of citrus and start going crazy.