Honeybees Might Prompt Faster Internet Server Technology

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.

clusters ?

[jacquesm]

I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.

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.

no central command ?

[permaculture]

Don't tell that to the queen.

Almost historical concept ...

[foobsr]

Quote [wikipedia.org] (Lem, The Invincible, paraphrased):
"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.

See: MUTE

[trawg]

MUTE is a privacy-protecting p2p application: MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior. [sourceforge.net]

ACO for corpse recovery

[Thanshin]

I used an ACO algorithm in a system to direct cow corpse recovery trucks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization [wikipedia.org]

I wonder if the people at the The Georgia Institute of Technology (git?) has nightmares with bees running through a series of tubes as I had about giant cow-corpse-eating zombie ants.

Sometimes swarm behavior is inefficient

[MichaelCrawford]

Several times I've seen flocks of birds flying in circles. One time I watched this for several minutes. The birds were flying really fast but going nowhere.

Re:Sometimes swarm behavior is inefficient

[TheGoodSteven]

Those birds you speak of are doing something called "updrafting". Basically, they find a spot where warm air is rising from the ground and glide around in circles in order to attain a higher altitude using much less energy. You might see this over highways quite often, since the black pavement sometimes causes warm air drafts. I think the best demonstration of inefficient swarm behavior is when it arises in humans.

Re:clusters ?

[daem0n1x]

Very much the opposite of humans who are very intelligent but, as a crowd, behave in a very stupid way.