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Honeybees Might Prompt Faster Internet Server Technology
coondoggie writes "The Georgia Institute of Technology is working on the theory that honeybees can give us hints about how to improve the speed and efficiency of Internet servers. Honeybees somehow manage to efficiently collect a lot of nectar with limited resources and no central command. Such swarm intelligence of these amazingly organized bees can also be used to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges." This has some similarities to the rules of the swarm discussion we had last week.
I for one welcome our new swarming server overlords!
"Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
All the researchers now need to do is to sell the technology to Microsoft and IIS will fly away from the net into the unknown.
I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.
It's still quite hard to come up with stuff that is not in some way already present in nature. If you are prepared to accept a certain level of metaphor.
MP3 Search Engine
Its not good making a new internet protocol, Comcast will only block it!
#include <sig.h>
Combining them is now called a virtual dance floor. Either that or I don't get this article.
heh heh. This so-called "swarm intelligence" will do nothing to teach us how to make efficient web servers. The hive and the swarm of bees operate efficiently but not because they have some sort of innate intelligence that allows them to do so. They operate in this manner because they are programmed to do so. The actions of each bee are based on something akin to a computer program. This program is designed in such a manner that when many units are executing it in parallel, with each unit operating on its own timer, so that statistically all parts of the program are being executed simultaneously across the bees in the swarm, the result is the efficient overall operation that we witness. However the point is that the individual program is designed so that the overall program will execute efficiently, regardless of where any particular instance of the individual program might be in its program code. Who did this programming? God. And the crazy thing is that beehives are only one tiny part of it. The overall program encompasses the entire universe. So ha ha ha... cuz you can study those bees all day long and it won't make you a better web programmer.
Don't tell that to the queen.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Honeybee method? Now that's a good buzzword.
The Internet is basically a series of bees.
Quote (Lem, The Invincible, paraphrased):
"A powerful military space ship a "second-class cruiser" called Invincible, lands on the planet Regis III to investigate the loss of sister ship, Condor. During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a new form of life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines. The evolution was controlled by "robot wars", and the only form that survived were swarms of minuscule, insect-like machines. Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless to humans and capable of only very simple behavior. However, when bothered, they can assemble into huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self-organization, and are able to defeat an intruder by--what could have been called today--a powerful surge of EMI. Some members of the spacecraft crew suffered a complete memory wipe-out as consequence. The angered crew attempts to fight the enemy, but eventually recognizes the meaninglessness of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word." (emphasis mine)
Hint for a scientific career; Revive old stuff!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Honeybees, and swarm intelligence in general assumes that the other members are working towards the good of the swarm. That is the polar opposite of what we need for a robust internet.
Rogue nodes would be able to disrupt the swarm in the same way that scientists are able to wreak havoc on hives, ants, and other 'swarms' by deliberately injecting fake disruptive markers/signals etc.
This technology sounds about as bright as cooperative multitasking. Suitable for a closed system (e.g. a single application) but an utter disaster if applied in an environment where some threads are just defective, or worse, hostile.
Sweet!
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
MUTE is a privacy-protecting p2p application: MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior.
So it's a lot like beowulf cluster of bees, right?
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
That is the question
This is all just a clever trick to gain publicity for Buzz and possibly even to provide more work for the mascot during the off season!
Better hope the RIAA/MPAA don't hear about it, though, or in four years we'll all be dead....
"Silly bunt."
Given the current problems ( mentioned on /. somewhere previously ) with bee colonies mysteriously disappearing I'm not sure its a good idea to base something as serious as web servers on their behaviour. It's all well and good whilst they behave themselves and work away as they should but what happens when they decide to mysteriously vanish ? What then ?
I say that nature and technology do not mix and only disaster awaits for mankinds foolish attempts to dally in that which it cannot understand.
Deleted
This sounds like the opposite to today's corporate culture, where a whole lot of smart people are part of a swarm, and the end product is utter stupidity...
"None of us is as stupid as all of us".
... for example it will help our local apiarists' internet servers to organize honey collections so much more efficiently. Sweet!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I used an ACO algorithm in a system to direct cow corpse recovery trucks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization
I wonder if the people at the The Georgia Institute of Technology (git?) has nightmares with bees running through a series of tubes as I had about giant cow-corpse-eating zombie ants.
Sweet! There certainly is a buzz around this technology, but I'll beelieve it when a beowulf cluster of linux-running overlords, with questionable Vista support, is welcomed by, for one, me in Soviet Russia.
Flux capacitor.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Maybe someday we'll get ruled by bees or ants.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
that's what you think...
Could this process be accelerated by allowing the bees to shoot from the mouths of barking dogs?
...isn't this article a bit beehind? I mean, don't we already have BEEttorrent?
Okay mods, don't let this bug you too much, but somebody has to stick out his nectar entertain the crowds.
*gets bricked*
has been around for a while. See for example discussion in the book Out Of Control, http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php . Kinda brings to mind the matrix movies.
Isn't this kind of what bittorrent does for us? Instead of 1 strained server we have one person or thousands of people that we download the information from.
...but then again, it might not. I'm getting bored to death with these 'might' attention attacking press releases. funny:5 is heavily overrated
Is there an RFC for IP over Apian carriers?
Then again, honeybees unexpectedly disappeared/died this year in large quantities, an event that I would not like to see our servers duplicate.
stuff |
There's gotta be a joke about honeypots hidden in there somewhere, if anyone can find it...
I mean really, can you imagine how many people would be killed when you have billions of honeybees employed to carry data packets around. Also, I dont think it would be faster either. Just imagine the lag time when you connect to a server 1000 miles away. You would keep saying, "Oh man, hurry up you shitty bees!!"
And there's a picture of a bee!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Google has set the precedent of using the animal kingdom to improve technology. Their PigeonRank technology is second to none! http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Obviously if the universe is mostly spaghetti code, it is a clear indication that the Creator must have been somehow involved in, well, spaghetti. Like say the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Talk about Occam's Razor - there is no simpler hypothesis available. Pasta -> Pasta. QED.
Honeybees? About time really, we have had honeypots for ages, and they don't fill themselves on their own you know.
Now all we need is to figure out some tech based on Winnie the pooh, so we can get to the honey. Mmmmm, honey.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Natural selection programmed bees.
...that the school whose mascot is Buzz would think bees might be the solution for, well, anything...
-Proud Georgia Tech alum
Does this mean my servers will now be subject to sudden, massive die-off?
It's a plot by HP, I tell you!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Bees Don't Lie.
The CB App. What's your 20?
My first reaction to the summary was that there's been lots written on this topic, and it's all about routing. So it doesn't apply to web servers at all, because they're not the modules doing the routing. (At least not in any system with a minimally intelligent design. ;-) Ant- and bee-inspired algorithms are useful, and have been used by routing code, of course, but why would one be talking about web servers?
So I took the radical step of actually reading the article. And I found it remarkably incoherent. It talks about web servers, not routers, and many of what should be the most informative sentences are just bizarre. They read as if written by someone who listened to a talk, picked out a lot of keywords, and jumbled them together in sentences that are only minimally grammatical English, but basically undecodable.
So I followed a few links. Sure enough, all the examples were about ants and bees giving each other travel direction, via pheromones or sun-oriented dances. This is nothing new, and has obvious application to decentralized packet routing. The critters are, after all, picking up packets (of food) and delivering them to a destination. You'd expect their algorithms to be useful in networks of data packets.
But I couldn't find any clue about how one might apply ant/bee algorithms to a web server's tasks. Did the folks writing the articles just invent this idea?
The closest was the mention of a flock of servers trying to do load balancing (though the writer didn't call it that). But that's not really a web-server task, even if implemented inside a web server. And that would be a poor place to put the code, since it's an orthogonal task that, if done by a separate task, would be useful for most other network apps. Putting it inside the web server makes it useless for all the other tasks that could benefit from it.
Of course, such poor system design is rather common inside computers. We do a lot of things in an entirely wrong way. Maybe someone really is doing ant/bee routing inside a web server. Anyone have a link to an actual description of this?
Maybe the authors just don't understand the distinction between a server, a task manager, and a router?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Don't most bees quit work at sundown? "What are you doing?" "I'm on the internet honey" ...Lorenzo
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Sherlock Holmes was regarded as an expert bee keeper. So...was it his innate analytical mind, or just his pet bees?
In Soviet Russia, everything runs linux.
Becareful from BEAR attacks !!!