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Honeybees Might Prompt Faster Internet Server Technology
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Nov 19, 2007 04:20 AM
from the heard-the-buzz-about-it dept.
from the heard-the-buzz-about-it dept.
coondoggie writes "The Georgia Institute of Technology is working on the theory that honeybees can give us hints about how to improve the speed and efficiency of Internet servers. Honeybees somehow manage to efficiently collect a lot of nectar with limited resources and no central command. Such swarm intelligence of these amazingly organized bees can also be used to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges." This has some similarities to the rules of the swarm discussion we had last week.
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The Rules of the Swarm 166 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers are starting to discover the simple rules that allow swarms of thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory at Princeton University, builds computer models of virtual swarms with thousands of individual agents that he can program to follow a few simple rules. Among the findings are that swarm behavior has patterns common to many different species, that just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, swarm behavior can also change abruptly in character, and that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively by creating a bias in the swarm's movement that steers it in a particular direction. The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies and researchers are working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish. "How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you're seeing?" Dr. Couzin says. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm."
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Oblig (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Funny)
"What's that, Bumbly?"
"Bzz"
"Network bottleneck at the 4th-floor router? How did that happen?"
"Bzz"
"Faulty ethernet card in room 402? Quick! We'd better get down there and save them!"
Parent
Colony Collapse Syndrome? (Score:4, Funny)
It's a plot by HP, I tell you!
Parent
clusters ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still quite hard to come up with stuff that is not in some way already present in nature. If you are prepared to accept a certain level of metaphor.
See: MUTE (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Nope. Humans won that one years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:clusters ? (Score:5, Funny)
Which is not to say that there isn't any room for improvement. There's a lot to be learned from wolves, for example, where each member of the pack serves a unique and important role.
It's quite likely that by combining aspects of many of these ecologies, we could create a system even more efficient than any individual one.
Imagine a Bee-Wolf cluster...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Compulsory Comcast comment (Score:5, Funny)
Round Robin and Bittorrent (Score:2)
Nanny nanny boo boo. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nanny nanny boo boo. (Score:5, Funny)
cuz you can study those bees all day long and it won't make you a better web programmer.
No, but you'll be a web programmer who knows a lot about bees. Think of the possibilities!
Parent
Re:Nanny nanny boo boo. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
spaghetti code (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously if the universe is mostly spaghetti code, it is a clear indication that the Creator must have been somehow involved in, well, spaghetti. Like say the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Talk about Occam's Razor - there is no simpler hypothesis available. Pasta -> Pasta. QED.
Parent
no central command ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:no central command ? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
After all... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Almost historical concept ... (Score:3, Interesting)
"A powerful military space ship a "second-class cruiser" called Invincible, lands on the planet Regis III to investigate the loss of sister ship, Condor. During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a new form of life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines. The evolution was controlled by "robot wars", and the only form that survived were swarms of minuscule, insect-like machines. Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless to humans and capable of only very simple behavior. However, when bothered, they can assemble into huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self-organization, and are able to defeat an intruder by--what could have been called today--a powerful surge of EMI. Some members of the spacecraft crew suffered a complete memory wipe-out as consequence. The angered crew attempts to fight the enemy, but eventually recognizes the meaninglessness of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word." (emphasis mine)
Hint for a scientific career; Revive old stuff!
CC.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not going to work outside of individual systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Rogue nodes would be able to disrupt the swarm in the same way that scientists are able to wreak havoc on hives, ants, and other 'swarms' by deliberately injecting fake disruptive markers/signals etc.
This technology sounds about as bright as cooperative multitasking. Suitable for a closed system (e.g. a single application) but an utter disaster if applied in an environment where some threads are just defective, or worse, hostile.
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Company Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like the opposite to today's corporate culture, where a whole lot of smart people are part of a swarm, and the end product is utter stupidity...
"None of us is as stupid as all of us".
Sometimes swarm behavior is inefficient (Score:3, Interesting)