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.

Comments

Not really new.

[rutger21]

I did some little research on this subject about two years ago. The goal of the project was complete autonomous network management. It has been a while ago, but IIRC the automatic routing adjustment worked like this:

a whole bunch of ants are randomly created at all routers in the network, with a mission to get to a random desitination

each router keeps a chance-table for each outgoing port for each destination (in the network), initially all outgoing ports have the same chance

ants start moving, pick an outgoing port randomly according to the chance table

ants remember their path and travelling time

if an ant reaches its destination, the trial it put down on its way over there affects the chance table in a positive way using the memory of the ant

It was rather fun, if I "removed" a router, ants really got adopted fast and found alternative routes. With redundant networks, routers started sending 50/50 to outgoing ports reaching the same destination. An{t,d} of course, as usual, many parts of this algorithms can be improved.

Re:Rogue ants

[tolan's my name]

Real ants are genetically programmed with loyalty to their hive

This isnt actually true. Many experiments have been done were both adult ants and larve have been transported between hives, usually there is no difference in behavior to native ants.

There are even a number of ant species that have not worker caste of their own and survive by raiding other ant colonies [of a differing species] and stealing larve. These then hatch and act as workers for the new colony.

If ants are genetically programed to do anything it is to react to certain smells

Swarm intelligence has been researched for awhile

[goldenfield]

There are actually quite a few uses for this type of technology (see my Master's thesis for references ). The AI community has been looking at swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems for years. NASA has sponsored research on using ant-like behavior in multiple robots to explore Mars (advantages in redundancy, system memory, command and control, etc...).

Also, check out The Swarm Development Group - you can download some software to play with alife sims, visualize really efficient search patterns, etc...