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"Evolved" Caches Could Speed the Net
SpaceDilbert writes "According to New Scientist, evolutionary algorithms could make many network caches twice as efficient. This article describes a study carried out by a US researcher and two German academics, who "evolved" algorithms to determine what data should be held at a cache and for how long."
From the article:
He[Pablo Funes] suggests networks might in the future be designed to work out who deserves the most help for themselves. "Sophisticated network behaviours might implement rules for reciprocity and trust," he says. "And conversely, for not cooperating with other others who try to abuse our resources."
The future of network security? Imagine the next computer virus outbreak: Every network in the world could recognize the virus type activity and allocate them lesser or zero resources, maybe sending them a "Virus detected, please run antivirus software or contact your IT Department" notice, and detecting outside attacks from viruses and automatically flagging them as unsafe, and not give much(or any) attention to traffic from or to that site
Actually, I do genetic algorithm / genetic programming research at the university of michigan. It's unlikely that these guys are using genetic algorithms to develop a new algorithm, but are rather using an existing algorithm and *tuning* the associated parameters using a GA. Given a list of parameters, GA's work by finding the best combination of parameters. As a result, the settings could be constantly tweaked (say on a daily/hourly basis) and different servers could still have different regional settings. My only problem with the concept is that it still depends on the tuning of pre-existing algorithms... but still - the results they share (2x improvement) is encouraging.