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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