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Better Networking Through Nature
The New York Times has an interesting piece about applying lessons from nature - specifically ant colonies - to solving networking and other problems. Not quite on the same level as Spidergoats, but intriguing nonetheless.
I remember thinking this was a neat idea a year or so back, when there was a paper about 'ant technology' being used as an efficient algorithm for the travelling salesman problem (mentioned in article).
Applying this to packet routing seems a really elegant idea, there are obvious similarities between optimising packet transport between sites and ant trails to food sources. What confuses me is the talk about P2P networks at the end of the article. It seems to be thrown in to jump on the P2P bandwagon: I mean, where's the similarity between Napster (mentioned by name in the article) and an ant colony? Well, there's no central intelligence (server) and...err..thats it?
Applying ant technology to solve a related problem is a potential solution to that problem. Spotting a vague similarity between two fashionable technologies does not automatically mean that that they are actually relevant to each other. Unless of course he's thought of something and not put it in the article...
All very well but I would suspect that for this to become effectove the packets execute code along their path.
The 'intelligent agent' was supposed to do this too (searching for you while you're not online).
There will be a flip side to it (there always is).
my wild speculation suggests rogue ants laying false trails, viruses tricking the packets into laying false trails, etc. etc.
Also for the internet the bandwidth isn't common property. Peering partners would end up playing prisoner's dilema with "should I make their packets take worse routes from our packets".
that's my criticism ne way
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This idea has also been applied to areas other than network routing. Do a search on 'ant colony optimization' to learn more...
To me, these ant-based algorithms seem very similar to genetic algorithms in used in optimization problems: using some random solutions as a seed, modifying them (via trait swaping or deviations from solution, depending on the algoritm,) and looking at some function defining how good the solution is. I realize it's more complicated than that, but that seems to be the gist of it.
In both cases, (ant based and genetic algotithms) it amazes me how much we can still learn from everyday things that we see in nature. I'd love to see what else may be on the horizon.
Maybe there needs to be two different types of ants. First, there needs to be a scout type that goes out and does scavenging to find routes and ensure solid routes exist. This ant will have no payload capacity. Second, there needs to be a worker ant that carries a payload, and has a lower chance of taking a route not already "marked" as good.
;-).
To retrofit our existing network infrastructure, the "scouts" could be installed as a routing protocol, and the "workers" would be IP packets (with a few more bytes of data?) that follow the trails left by the scouts.
[hope]If a big company such as Cisco would jump on this with an extension to IOS, we may very well see this type of routing scheme become very popular.[/hope] It will take a huge undertaking to get something like this off the ground, so I'd bet that we would see a hybrid-ized solution (such as the one I just stated) before we see a new generation of "ant routers" (they would be very small
It's very promising technology. I can't imagine what the future will hold.
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