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Self-Assembling Networks
prostoalex writes "Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks. By emulating the behavior of ants and insects the team, which is led by Frank Schweitzer, demonstrated a simulation where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages. Schweitzer's research papers are available off his personal Web site. The scientific paper referred in the original article, Self-Assembling of Networks in an Agent-Based Model is available off Cornell server."
My network team looks *just* like a swarm of ants when the network goes down.
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
Imagine if you will being able to create and configure a LAN using technology like this? How long till we see it in Linux.
Setting -> autolan configure -> select yes -> give network a name -> done!
"this network looks like a bunch of spiders having an orgy" has new meaning...
Taking this idea one step further, what if each computer node on the network was given a basic set of rules so that it emulated a bunch of brain cells. Would the network self-organise to create some sort of intelligence?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Is this a joke? If so it's not very funny. That link has nothing to do with this subject - don't click on it...
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There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
My girlfriend was going to study Networks Cabling and Construction (wires , switches ...). It will be funny to say her she will be messed with ants and spiders ... I think you will hear her scream from USA :D
------- The last Sig. got fired.
MS platforms have had self-assembling perr-to-peer networks for years. The latest one even worked with SQL Server!
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i have nothing informative to say.. but hell, i think this is really great software-engineering development.
For now I stick to OSPF. And it is not centralized also. And so are BGP, RIP an ISIS.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
"We are your network...ect..ect...we will adapt"
The article was posted to his web site in 1999 and this is front-page stuff? And the article itself was published in 1997. Stop the presses!
dinosaur comics
Now it seems that my time in college is wasted. No need for network admins.
HUB, "MALFORMED PACKET!!!! AHHH!!!! - HELP HELP HELP! I am lost!"
Router "Calm down, this is nothing compared to the broadcast storm of 93. Everything will be alright."
HUB, "Thank you,"
Router "These simpletons, when will they ever learn just to ignore that packet."
ala - bugs life.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
"By emulating the behavior of ants and insects..."
(I wonder who played the Queen...)
I didn't know ants were this advanced! This must be the final proof that indeed insects are super-intelligent aliens come to earth to eat our... ehm... sugar-water... If only we can harness this power elsewhere! Maybe we should try milipede power-plants next... All that static electricity from all those legs must be harnessed!
...of how we can study millions of years of evolution and use it to help our daily lives.
go ants!
Wasn't Skynet supposed to be self-aware like 5 years ago?
I mean, it's 2003, and we don't even have systems that we can't leave alone over the weekend. Where's the AI that's supposed to do all of the thinking for us, so we can actually get some free time? [Okay, there's that little problem with it trying to kill off all humans, but well, I'm sure they'll fix that in release 2]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Metaman - The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. It'll definetely change your views
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...and then all the system administrators disappear.. But then again, most sysadmins arnt even around their networks. instead they are answering calls from room 0139 because her computer can't boot up.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
I am Captain Network!
*theme song*
Captain Network,
He's our hero,
gonna cut packet loss
down to zero!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
[with awe]
The. Ultimate. Napster.
Anyone read Michael Crichton's new book, Prey? This kind of thing is a little scary after reading that one!
So I wonder how long it'll take before we see this idea applied to mesh-networks? I mean that really does seem like a logical progression for this It was my understanding that 'keeping the network up' was a big problem for the current implimentation of wifi meshnets...
This article is beyond ridiculous. It is more like a pointless press release from Dr. Seuss than actual info.
A node does this, then it does that, that somehow attracts other nodes doing something else, and POOF, the world is a great place to live in once again...
Give me a break. I'd rather read about magic, self-healing, server pixie-dust.
On a similar note, look for Dr. Seuss' latest book in stores soon: "One Node, Two Node, Red Node, Blue Node"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages
Where can i buy one of these cute little critters.
I would put it with those sea monkeys i have...
This could be really cool for ad-hoc wireless networks.
I can empathize considering I just lost my finanicial aid and job thanks to budget cuts.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Anyone who does knows this is just a step before the evil computer AI infecting all of the other computers in the world and setting about to destroy mankind. I will rise up to defeat this terrible menace right after I find a girl with blue hair and eyes the size of dinner plates.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
A lot of the web service intermediaries have these kind of capabilities...
You plug in their agents on the network and they slowly become aware of each other through message exchange. When one section of the network goes down the agents talk to each other to figure out which agent can be used to relay a message around the broken link.
It's really wierd to be up in layer 7 and see the same modeling of behavior of lower layers in the stack...
If it was real ants there'd be none of this "You have the blue nodes and we'll have the red nodes" niceness.
:)
:)
The blue ants would be killing the red ants and vice versa - and the scent given off by the dying ants would attract more ants to the area until there was one hell of a war going on for territory (nodes). With the winners getting better connectivity for their network. And the ants would quickly specialise into scouts, soldiers and queens (to reinforce the army).
Come to think of it, that'd be much more interesting than plain old networking anyway
All this cuteness and collaboration all the time - do people not realise that the Mother in Mother Nature isn't mother as in 'caring nurturing type person' - it's mother as in M.O.A.B.
I've help test, write and measure the success of code that does exactly this. Our implementation uses the ants to collect routing latencies and update routing tables. It's actually surprisingly efficient and deals very well with downed nodes depending on your timeouts for downed nodes, etc.
They call this "Self Assembled" as if it has some sort of adaptive intelligence. It does not, it has some algorithms that will have to be understood and worked around when they fail. This should be called "Algorithmically Assembled" or "Programmatically Assembled" so more people won't anthropomorphize their electronic equipment, imbuing it with special properties it just doesn't have.
Been there. Done that. These types of algorithms are not exactly new, and what this paper describes is no more "self-assembling" than any other distributed routing/discovery protocol - examples of which have existed for over twenty years. Of course, lots of things are new to the Slashdot editors that are old to the rest of us.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
The somewhat self-assembling nature of P2P networks got me thinking about little swarms of tiny clean up robots. Instead of a hunanoid robot, it seems what would be more useful and simpler for things like household or even commercial maintenanc is a network of small robots relying on each other for various specialized functions sort of like cells in a larger organism.
It seems like you almost have to forego the android approach and go this way to get automated maintenance workers financially feasible because there will be certain parts that will tend to wear out much faster than others. It's the nature of the clean up game that many of the parts are consumeables.
While my musings on P2P were rather far from the goal, this sounds quite a bit closer. I know some fugly buildings in a town not far from here that could really use a good scrub down.
People have been tlaking for years about how kludged together the current internet infrastructure is; my question is, might something like this make for a feasable replacement, or at least a suppliment to what is already out there? I can see this being very useful indeed. You'd be able to de-centralize the root servers, and have them be distributed from
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't know a lot about the state-of-the-art in the area of network discovery/repair other than what I know as a socket-programmer and sysadmin, but I'm wondering if someone who does know can point out the differences between, say, this research and Apple's Rendezvous (not to be confused with Tibco's product by the same name)?
It seems to me that the basic goals are similar, but with Apple focusing more on the engineering side of solving a user-problem rather than passing the point of diminishing returns on "correct" solutions. Please, feel free to enlighten me though. This stuff is actually really promising, and I hope to live in a world 5 years from now where my laptop just "fits in" to the network that it's placed on in more ways than mere DHCP can accomodate.
Thanks!
Why am I not surprised that the people in Humboldt found a way for themselves to do less work?
;-)
I wonder if we'll see a press release from them later saying they've designed something to emulate a particularly famous local plant.
How To Get Humans To Mars
IT Guy: We're being nailed off our ABC uplink with a denial of service attack!
Manager: Well, we still have our DEF uplink in reserve. Drop everything from ABC!
IT Guy: Okay, much better now.... oh wait, the network reassembled to attack our DEF link!
Manager: I think I'll be cavorting in Arizona for a while...
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Good god, didn't you people learn anything from The Matrix?! Agent-based architecture is the most dangerous type of computer system you can design!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
You apparently didn't read the PDF. Or (more likely) you skimmed over it without understanding any of it. Either way give the PDF a read.
P.S. I know I'm responding to a troll but its been a long time since I've done so and at least I'm doing it AC
Use this link to report that moron: Report spammer
-- Daemon@Slashdot
I'm of the opinion that spammers represent an infection of the net and that we are watching how the network is adapting to fight it off.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
While it's nice that this guy wrote a paper about this, I already know of one company that is putting it into practice (obviously because they're not done with it yet, I can't give you a link - but I can tell you that I heard about the project three years ago). Considering that this is already in the hands of a corporation, it's been in the academic world for quite a lot longer.
In fact, I had a prof who wrote a paper about that. In fact, he got accepted as a professor at my old school because of his network knowledge in that area (that was five years ago). Can anybody point out why this guy's writing isn't redundant?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It still requires humans to setup the architecture
before anyone or anything could use it.
I.e., someone has to set up the OSI level 1 and level 2 before any "thing" could use it.
Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks
Why did they have to build the network if it was self-assembling?
Sun was right. Now, the network really is the computer.
The paper is indeed very interesting and innovative, but keep in mind that it is very far from being suitable to embed into your next 802.11 adapter.
While this approach is indeed appealing, it has still some drawbacks, e.g:
- generally, you can't tell what your topoligy your network will end up having, so forget about architecting one
- it does not guarantee that all your nodes will end up being networked within a fixed number of attempts (see the fig. 3 in the paper)
- it tends to require significant redundancy of interchangeable nodes to function well
Such approach can work well, say, for military field communications, but would be clearly suboptimal for building a corporate network.
And of course, as most of agent research, this is still too far from established technology ready for production.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
The method outlined is an interesting one, but
it has a couple of weaknesses:
* It does not guarantee that every adjacent node
has an actual flow/connection in place (note that
the article says almost every link, not every
one).
* It accumulates information on a random basis
rather than an on-demand basis. While the agents
will in fact eventually find out what the network
looks like, there's no guarantee that they will
find the most needed path first, or even ever.
* There's a degree of implied overhead in the
actions of these agents, necessitated by the
repeated travel over various links, analogous
to a system where one polls to check a link's
speed/state.
* There is no mention in the article of how
routing to remote nodes is achieved; I can
speculate that a piece of information is carried
by an agent acting randomly until it reaches
the right place, but this seems exceedingly
inefficient.
It is quite possible to construct a network
protocol in which the protocol organises itself
without agents, based very simply on the presence
and number of adjacent nodes (active network
links). As a matter of fact, I have done so.
Using on-demand creation of routes permits one
to ignore failures until such time as they
affect desired routes, and only using on-demand
creation of routes means that a lot of preliminary
setup communication can be reduced.
It is also possible to, with very minor human
input, add both a naming system and an encryption
system into the same setup, giving one eventually
a truly decentralised network in which namespaces
can be assembled and dismantled as needed without
reference to a central authority, and in which
authentication can be set up and confirmed by a
trusted authority, or set of authorities.
It dawned on me while I was doing this, after
I'd successfully constructed proofs of efficiency,
that the people most interested would probably
be the mafia, so I stopped work on it. Pity;
it is an interesting challenge, but with the
predominance of IP, it looks like human-organised
networks (yes, IPv6 is also human organised, and
still pretty darn centralised in many ways) are
with us to stay.
Perhaps I'm not understanding something, but how do the researchers intend on having the nodes in a real life network emit 'pheremones'? The only application I can see for that is self organizing wireless hubs. But for hard wired networks it does not seem to make sense, since there is no way to estimate the ease of connecting two points based on distance alone.
Overall, this article only seems to apply to wireless networks. An interesting, but limited, usage.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Wouldn't this also be very similar to Sun's JINI technology?
Andrew Harvey wrote basically the same exact article about ten years ago. The only difference was that he attempted to relate this concept to spirituality. The guy who wrote this article, Frank Schweitzer, has been accused in the past of taking ideas from other Conihilimous (The study of self structuring autonomous networks) experts such as Andrew Harvey and the asian mathemetician Niyh B. Tihtzen. just my two cents
or does this sound remarkably like something leading up to Michael Crichton's Prey?
Admin: WHO in God's name sprayed for bugs in the office??? You just killed half of the network!!!
I wonder what the pheramone, to indicate a path to the internet has been found, will smell like?
I'm guessing that it will smell a lot like pr0n.
We're mortal -- which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful --
but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and
then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?
-- Ensign Flandry
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