Slashdot Mirror
Fruit Flies Making Inroads on Autonomous Computing
Jucius Maximus writes "The configuration of base stations in cell phone networks has always been problematic because you can never predict how many phones will connect to which base station. And sometimes adjacent antennas will use the same frequency leading to dropped calls. Such configuration challenges may have solutions in autonomous computing. An article on C|NET describes how British Telecom is examining the development of fruit flies, hoping that nature has already found the solution to this problem. This technology could also be applied to 'threat-sensing' on computer networks."
come up with the noise the phone makes when it rings. :)
Video Game cheats, hints a
Dead Fruit == Beowoulf cluster
*Ducks
The solution is to just train fruit flies (instead of carrier pigeon) to carry the messages. Forget the radiation causing cell phones and switches, use Drosophila, nature has the solution.
Only things is...your message recepient must be in the same room with you...and have a banana in his pocket.
'British Telecom is examining the development of fruit flies, hoping that nature has already found the solution to this problem.'
AT&T has also joined the fray, though it has chosen the hippopotamus as it's bringer of change, and Verizon is leaning toward the studying Brazilians due to their high amounts of energy.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
This is another interresting idea on making systems that can self-adapt and grow/repair without intervention from engineers.
This is fine but if we take the 'nature' analogy that this science is following what happens when disease or illness strikes? For example a computer virus or trojan.
We will be dependent on crucial systems that, at some stage in the future, we will not understand how they work or how to repair them quickly.
This maybe acceptable for cell phone networks but what would happen if this was an air traffic control system?
I'm all for following the route in the Cnet article but we need to ensure that we build in processes to control and understand the changes that the system is implementing.
if this is threat-sensing technology, then i want an Africanized Bee-owulf...oh, forget it...
This article should really win the Captain Obvious award. I mean, really, it's not too hard to come up with the idea of "tell your neighbors which frequencies you're using". I could have saved them a bunch of money if they had asked me instead of some dumb flies! Yeesh.
Damn. For a minute there I thought they were implanting transmitters into fruit flies. Where I live, that would certainly solve the problem of distribution; fruit flies are everywhere.
This... would seem somewhat obvions to anyone who's had to deal with overlapping systems sharing a rather small resource, I'd think. As soon as I read the description of the problem, my first reaction was, "build an auto-negotiating, ad-hoc type system that'd figure it out for itself". As an example, don't networks of SMB clients (with no servers present) already hold "elections" to see who should be the Browse Master?
On the other hand, the article wasn't to clear on whether BT was using the general idea from the fruit fly, or was using some algorythm derived directly from those cells.
Let's just hope they don't try and patent it.
They were a bit vague on what goes on in the fly, so here's a short synopsis:
The entire back of the fly has the potential to become either a sensory organ or cuticle (the fly's skin). Things get narrowed down by the expression of some sensory-promoting proteins in clusters of cells at specific locations. The process they're intrigued by is how a single cell within this cluster becomes sensory.
All of these cells begin expressing a signal and a receptor for that signal. When the signal is received, a cell will turn down the expression of both the signal and the sensory promoting genes. Cells that aren't receiving the signal will turn down the expression of the receptor and turn up the expression of the signal. Thus, when a cell isn't seeing a lot of signal, it both reduces its ability to see any more, and increases its signaling to surrounding cells.
In the end, it all becomes a balancing act between signaling and seeing signaling from neighboring cells. The thought is that the initiation of the process is somewhat stochastic - some cells may turn on the signal earlier than others or start of expressing it at a higher level. The result of the signaling reinforcing itself is that this initial small advantage is greatly amplified, and becomes an all-or-nothing decision.
I hope that is more coherent than i think it is...
JT
______ This mind intentionally left blank.
There seems to be a trend here.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Time flies like an arrow.
Since frequency is the inverse of time, the solution is obviously with fruit flies!
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Got Wisdom?
http://www.conceptlab.com/fly/
And yes, there is a video (2.2meg QT) and extended wiring diagrams
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You have a weak need to inhale after every exhalation, but that need grows exceedingly pressing -- occupying your entire consciousness, instead of being something of which you're hardly aware -- if you just hold your breath for a minute or so. The priority "inhale" becomes higher than the priority "type the next word in this message", for example.
For cell-phones, it seems that either there will be too many antennae [wasting resources of subscribers who pay for them, indirectly] or occasionally too few [possibly thwartingg important communication].
A solution would be a button on the phone that indicates the priority of outgoing calls, or the priority to be assigned for incoming calls. Call me naive, but I think most folks would be happy to turn the priority down a notch, when they are just calling to chat about unimportant fluff.
I realize that these comments may be more germaine to other applications, since cell-phone communications don't really seem that limited [given the number of folks with those mobiles fixed to their faces], but the idea remains: adding priority to the mix works in nature, and it may work in technology as well.
Is it because some egghead "thought up" a great idea that been around for a while? Or is it that mega company need some stupid press?
Self adjusting / Self modifing routines have been around "forever". The Fuzzy logic used in some Japnesse clothes washer and air-condioning systems show the way.
The techinology for the computerized camera positioning of Star Wars 4 (was 1)- The New Hope, had self correcting routines built in.
So some telecom just thought this up!
Some news.
There is nothing new about modeling cellular automata in CS but the natural world could have a lot to contribute in this area. Finding the set of rules that produce a particular equilibrium system can be as much art as it is science. Instead we could look to nature for a pattern that represents our desired outcome. Then look at the rules in the natural system to see how the equilibrium is reached.
The system would still be fully predictable because the rules can be modeled. If you want to know what will happen if you take a base station off-line just get status info from all the stations, load your model & see how it changes. Need to fix a problem, same solution.
Perhaps river channel migration can be applied to the problem of network bottlenecks.
Very cool stuff
err
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
...you beat me to it. :-)
Miko O'Sullivan
...time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Time flies like an arrow:
Fruit flies like control.
"We must be willing to give up a certain amount of control, at least of detailed control," in order to let these self-regulating systems succeed, Shackleton said.
Yet again is there hope Nature has come first.
Well, all cases I can think of where Nature came first is when Man already had developed a technology, and, later, discovered that Nature was first. Think sonar-bats, jets-squids, etc.
Is there any case where Nature has inspired us into something more advanced than we already know?
According to the last sentence of this article, they interviewed T. J. Watson on the subject of autonomous computing. This would interest me greatly, since he's been dead since 1993.
Ahhh, conscientious reporting at its finest.
The configuration of base stations in cell phone networks has always been problematic because you can never predict how many phones will connect to which base station.
True. However, it doesn't much matter most of the time. We monitor the usage of our sites, and expand those that require it. We also preemtivly expand those that are predicted to require it, and those that we know are going to cover major events, IE concerts, conventions, etc.
And sometimes adjacent antennas will use the same frequency leading to dropped calls.
If this is happening, your RF engineer is an idiot. The process of planning what sites use what frequencies is somewhat intensive, but putting the same frequency on two addjacent sites is a complete fsck up. More typical is a site overshooting and interfering with another one several miles away.
But with dozens of base stations, each broadcasting with six of the 29 available frequencies
I know that BT has alot more capacity problems than most places here in the US. However, my company uses 3 frequencies per site, from a list of 24. Each site also freqency hops on a list of 18 more freqencies. Hopping really makes all this possible.
That's great, but what they really need to do is to find a way to keep the fruit flies away from my monitor!
the whole point was to REMOVE bugs from the system...
-------
Aww, FSCK!
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I think your crazy to believe that people would have any courtesy in this area at all.
So this is like elevators using Fuzzy logic?. If you everyday work is in a building where the elevators uses Fuzzy Logic, you really notices when you move to a building where they don't. I would have thought that with the rate mobile masts are getting installed everywhere a technology that the article mentions, would already had be created? Now I have no knowledge about how these networks are controlled, but if there is no automated adjustments I can understand why there are so many "dead spots".
my sig
We all know that fruit flies multiply at an alarming rate. Now consider, in turn, that time flies like an arrow -- if said experiments go awry, it could be discovered that fruit flies like a BANANANANANANANA...
Dvorak reports on insects and harddrives.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Let's just hope they don't try and patent it.
Look at Craig Reynolds' work at www.red3d.com. He developed a similar distributed system for use in computer animation in 1987. Very good for modelling groups of animals such as flocks or herds.
The general concept at use here - complex, adaptive behaviour resulting from local interactions between agents - is referred to as emergence, and has been a subject of research since the animation work of Reynolds' and the robotic work of Rodney Brooks (from about 1986 on).
It is good to see big corps showing an interest in it though.
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious to me too. But some people are married to the top-down, centralized approach I guess...
-- This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
perl. line noise. no more need be said.
Just cause it's on topic, and helps explain the "autonomous computing" reference in the intro to this thread...
IBM's Autonomic Computing site: http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
As it turns out, autonomous computing is one of the trends we're following closely at O'Reilly. It's one of the major themes at our emerging technology conference (Building the Internet Operating System) in Santa Clara May 13-16. Robert Morris of IBM is giving a keynote on the subject, and we've got a whole subtrack on biological models for computation. "Emergence" is also the theme of Steven Johnson's keynote.
Overall, if you look at some of what's been happening in the peer-to-peer space (with decentralization@yahoogroups.com being a great place to do that), you'll see how all these themes are coming together with the emergence of new internet-scale operating system models.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com
I forgot where I read this, but I remember something saying that the majority of fruit flies are gay :-)! Though, it might be more of nature's form of population control within the fruit fly community.
;-)
Two cats are all that my partner and I really want to deal with, though some of my coworkers are raising kids (two lesbian couples and a gay couple.. I work at a very gay-friendly non-profit). If we were breeders instead, then we'd have too many people on our planet (just a thought)..