Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. SOURCE CODE WARNING! by Alsee · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anthill is full of bugs!

    -

    --
    - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  3. Right idea, short of content by Hobbex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They have the right idea when it comes to studying large distributed networks. Network emergent properties is absolutely the most interesting thing in that field, and I strongly believe that it is a much better model for trying to handle highly dynamic networks than trying to route within a rigid structure as lot of object location networks have been designed to do.

    That said, peer to peer network simulators and frameworks are a dime a dozen - anybody who was at the last O'Reilly "P2P" conference would have noticed that everybody, their mother, and their great-aunt Petrunella seems to have one. Setting up a bunch of java interfaces is not that hard, and calling a Node a "Nest" and giving it the following methods:

    public interface Nest {
    void request(Request request,
    ReplyListener listener);
    void addService(AntFactory factory);
    void addNeighbor(NestId nid);
    void removeNeighbor(NestId nid);
    NestId[] getNeighbors();
    }

    is not exactly a radical new design.

    What is really needed are more examples of analytical work regarding the emergence of and utility of routing properties in the known algorithms, as well as other radically new routing schemes besides Freenet. I'm glad that these people have their framework in place, but it really isn't news until they have something to show for it.