Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks

prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."

Re:Um...

[morgan_greywolf]

Not sure what the link is, but this asshat threw the same one in the last story. The javascript is massive and slowed my browser to a crawl.

Re:Did you ever notice

[gardyloo]

I believe you've made a fencepost error. In this case, it will read:
      0) porn

blurb misleading

[pavera]

The blurb is very misleading, this isn't about serving ads faster, or even about banner ads reporting their load times. It isn't about routing bottlenecks either, it is about distributed loads, and dynamic resource allocation on the server side.

The methodology used is this:
you have a server farm, this server farm is serving up many different sites. Internal to the server farm is an "ad board" for lack of a better term. When Site A's load spikes it's dedicated server can post an ad to the "ad board" which other servers in the farm can see. Then, servers which are dedicated to other sites, but are basically sitting idle can pick up the ad, say "oh I can help out this site over here" and somehow join the load balancing cluster that is server Site A's content. If necessary, the second (and however many other servers) can also place an ad on the board, getting more and more servers included serving up Site A.

As Site A's traffic decreases, less and less servers will be needed, so they will stop posting ads, and fewer and fewer servers will be serving Site A.

This is about dynamically allocating resources across a large data center/cluster not serving ads on the internet or even about optimal routing of traffic on the internet, instead of having a single server dedicated to serving 1 site, you have many servers which dynamically based on load decide which sites to serve.

Ants have a similar behavior

[cyngus]

Ants also do a similar thing. The difference is that they release chemicals as they travel. The more ants that travel the same path, the stronger the trail, the more likely the path will continue to be traveled. This also has some consideration for traveling velocity. All other things being equal, a faster (typically shorter) path will have a stronger chemical signature because more ants will traverse it per unit time. Further, new, potentially better, paths will be discovered on rare occasion that an ant gets lost or for some reasons falls off the established path. In artificial simulations this trailblazing can be amplified by increasing the random chance that from any given network hop, the ant/packet will choose some new direction which may be totally random or may be based on other paths that have already been traversed.