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Self-Repairing Spacecraft Uses Ant Logic
Elitist_Phoenix wrote to mention a New Scientist story about what could be the first steps towards a self-repairing spacecraft. From the article: "The team at CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation, is working with NASA on the project and has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area."
The idea here is detection before anything else. There may be other methods of repair, power or communication, but the first part of the process is knowing just where the damage is caused.
Imagine a car that can sense it has a broken taillight. That might seem like some minor technology, but alerting a driver that the left rear taillight is out may be all that's needed, and repair or awareness that the break exists is already making a drive safer.
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This sounds like something out of his novel Prey. In the book, virtual "agents" are developed and coded within a computer system, and one of the AI behaviors is modeled on ants. Of course, with technology developed like this, and implemented into other types of machines, such as nano particles, new species could be created, and problems could arise.
they need to hire some new blood. these 60 year old donkeys they got with these 60 year old ideas just got to go. why the christ wouldn't you make the sensors able to communicate with EVERY other node? they do realize that if a large ring shaped problem occurred in the net that the inner nodes could never communicate with the outer nodes. there is no reason to do things this way and it doesn't make the problem any more fail safe, it just makes the solution to any problem based on this data that much more prone to special cases. dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
Steps of dynamic routing:
1. discover an efficient route
2. detect loss of connectivity
3. goto 1
This is only step 2 and only for a finite, non-expanding, known set of nodes whose relative topological positions are pre-arranged for convenience. Ie in terms of relative complexity this is to Tic-tac-toe as dynamic routing is Go.
Check out AntNet and MUTE.
(JetiAnts and AntsP2P are offshoots of MUTE as far as I can tell.)