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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."
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.
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.
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.
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