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Ants in your P2Pants

Posted by michael on from the riaa-kills-ants-dead dept.

Tim Finin writes: "Anthill is a framework being developed at University of Bologna to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive Systems, typically found in biological and social sciences. In Anthill, desired properties such as resilience, adaptation and self-organization correspond to the "emergent behavior" of the underlying CA system. An Anthill system consists of a dynamic network of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agents (ants) travel through this network, interacting with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complex problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Ant systems for dynamic problems by Titanhead · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nice to see a more practical application of ant systems. The past year I have been working with ant systems in a more academic setting: optimizing dynamic problems (problems that change over time) using ant systems. Travelling salesman to be more precise, but my salesmen (sales-ants?) encountered traffic jams.
    The research can be found here
    Next idea: ant based routing. Get rid off BGP, use ants :)

  2. Bio-Mimetics by cosmosis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sooner or later more of our Technological systems will emulate nature. For those who haven't read Kevin Kelly's masterpeice - Out of Control should do so. Our tecnhological future will become more and more alive as time progresses.

    --
    www.enthea.org
  3. Ants and British Telecom by elem · · Score: 4, Informative

    Draging a hazy memory out of my brain... I'm sure that I saw an article about 'ant-modeling' in New Scientist quite a lot of years ago (at least 2/3 years ago) where they were using ant's and their scent trails (modeled of course...) to find the optimum routes across a network.

    I think it worked as followed:
    Put a bunch of ants on the start node, all they know how to do is travel from node to node and they know when they reach the end node.

    Each ant will go down a path to a connected node, except that they will not backtrack to their previous node. Each of these ants is releasing an electronic scent and they are more likly to go down the path with the strongest scent.

    Repeat with several thousand ants and you should have your optimum path across the network.

    I seem to recall that the article said that BT (British Telecom) was looking into this as a way to optimise the routes that a phone call takes from switching station to switching station... but it was a very long time since I read it.

    [No ants were harming in the writing of this post]