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."

Comments

*scratches head*

[Akardam]

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.