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:Danger Will Robinson

[MBCook]

What I got from reading the article was that they weren't optimizing the 'net at large but the services in one data center. By making the individual servers in the data center allocate themselves to the various hosted sites/services based on demand. Because of this, it's basically immune to external cheating, after all there is no point. If they were changing who's packets went through their network on the way to somewhere else, there would be a reason to cheat.

The article makes perfect sense, but the domain seems a little limited to me. You have to be able to quantize things. You have to be able to shift things around (make server A be able to pick role X, Y, or Z based on which is better at the moment). In some problem sets this would be easy. For example the /. setup that was described a while back where they have a few boxes doing this, a few doing that, and they all work off the same read only NSF share. It would be easy to move the boxes that run user pages between that and static pages. It could help there.

On the other hand, the boxes couldn't switch between being web and DB boxes very fast (you would have to load up all that data) so you couldn't let the boxes choose between those two roles (you'd lose most all your benefit from the expense of the switch).

The choices have to be relatively homogeneous.

Re:Danger Will Robinson

[guruevi]

If you've ever "herded" bees, you would know that even if you have a full suit, they'll attack you and be successful if you agitate them. So too with us nerds, if we figure out (and it's quite easy) that you're herding us to a specific patch for ad-revenue or whatyouwant, it will sting no matter who you are and what protection measures you have.

Bees more than inspiring ...

[foobsr]

TFA: "Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication provides a "beautiful" feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted."

Not that they seem to have ways to resolve aspects of the tragedy of the commons, no ...

"Honey-bee mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm for optimal reservoir operation" ( link [sciencedirect.com])

They help to improve otherways too.

CC.

it already exists

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it already exists and in widespread use... It's called the ants algorithm.
It was developed by Marco Dorigo at the Free university of brussels http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/HomePageDorigo/ [ulb.ac.be]