user72536: Does anyone by chance know? Can't seem to find this anywhere and this question popped into my head. 

user62587: Presumably (I'm not sure, this is an educated guess) they called it an antminer because they have very many of them, all set to do a single thing and doing it well. One could compare their mining pool to an ant hive, where each mining ASIC is an individual ant, foraging for food.
This is a very common metaphor, because ants are fascinating creatures, whose actions are completely governed by very simple rules, which cause truly incredible emergent behavior. See: Ant Colony Optimization for a good example of this.

72536: <p>Does anyone by chance know? Can't seem to find this anywhere and this question popped into my head. </p>
 62587: <p>Presumably (I'm not sure, this is an educated guess) they called it an antminer because they have very many of them, all set to do a single thing and doing it well. One could compare their mining pool to an ant hive, where each mining ASIC is an individual ant, foraging for food.</p>

<p>This is a very common metaphor, because ants are fascinating creatures, whose actions are completely governed by very simple rules, which cause truly incredible emergent behavior. See: Ant Colony Optimization for a good example of this.</p>
