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Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks
prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."
You know the tubes thing is a joke, right? You can't send live bees down it to figure out how to make it faster.
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Man I'm not even going to read the summary or TFA no time for that time to hire a ton of bees! Forget outsourcing to China and India and Eastern Europe, teh beehive is where it's at.
I like basketball!!1!
The bees won't have room to fly properly in the tubes. Even I know that much.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Well, I notice that one way of optimising _my_ experience is to switch off the ads, java, javascript and plug-ins. Blazingly fast, the tubes then become.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I used to have a problem with bees around there the FIOS ONT cabling enters my house.
Freakin' hazard going anywhere near the thing.
And my internet is freakin' fast. They might be onto something.
Internet researchers get hives investigating honey of an optimization tool
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
From November
-USR1
The problem of internet optimization stopped being a research subject years ago and is more of a business problem. Peering relationships and lowest cost routing mean that traffic will often travel a suboptimal route from a networking perspective because it is the best route from a providers financial perspective.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's also cruel. But more to the point; what's the MTU of your average Bee?
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
...the bee's knees.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Now we'll have routers do the wiggly bee dance AND check the ping times at the same time. :)
What will they think of next, EBGP?
Hyperom.com
Talk about a way to get "buzz" for your Web site...
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
Bees make the best web 2.0 buzzwords. They're the buzziest! I blame the hive mentality of the marketing drones for this.
today is spelling optional day.
Seems like it would be rather exploitable by "herding" the "bees" to another path. Would be nice to be able to be able to have an intelligent layer to networking that knew when it was having its strings pulled. All I'm saying is that it seems like any kind of error checking required for this to be stable and secure would negate any benefit from having such a dynamic network. The power of suggestion is often unnoticed, for ironic reasons.
We should have tracking hounds come in and look for faster routes for traffic, too. And they can have bees in their mouths, so when they bark at the target they shoot bees at it
Dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they optimize your local network and find rogue wireless access points?
"Beer Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks"
I'm not sure what the alcohol has to do with network optimization, but I'll just say right now that I'm for it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The end of the article comments on how the bee algorithm also allows the data center to save power. It seems like if the data center isn't getting many requests, it can send some servers into power saving standby mode. Much like if there isn't much honey to collect, the bees stay in the hive and save energy.
Are other web data centers able to shut down some servers at night to save power, or is it just because this data center seems configured to allow the servers to each serve any number of websites?
...in the bee world. Bees don't have an economy and work for no apparent reason other than to advance the hive. If the bees worked out of self gain and received payment for every other bee that went to a particular flower; you'd see tons of waggle dancing. Eventually, the other bees would ignore them completely and all that's left is 75% of the original bee workforce attempting to get in the entrance that is constantly being blocked by dancers.
The concept of the individual server is dead to me. What would make sense TO ME would be a san sitting at one logical end of the datacenter, and a big cluster of apache servers sitting at the other...
Lets say that there is a server farm hosting 1000 different websites for people to host pictures of their cats. Most of these people are not going to need a full server for their cat pictures, so lets say we have 100 web servers total. Now lets say that www.omfgmycats.com gets posted to the slashdot frontpage and the server that hosts it starts acting like it just swallowed a bottle of valium. The server goes down and all of the ad revenue that could have been generated by those pageviews is lost! OH NOES!
In MY idea, everything is virtual....in this situation, as more and more requests started coming in; www.omfgmycats.com could have started to eat more and more of the data center's available resources. If conditions allowed for it, www.omfgmycats.com could potentially be consuming 90% of the data center's resources (resources being RAM, processer cycles, power, cooling, bandwidth, etc) with the other 999 cat websites eating a combined total of 10% of the data center.
I don't know, it all makes sense in my head.....to me, we should start looking at big server farms as complete units, and not just the individual parts that make them up.
Does that make sense to anybody else? Or am i describing a type of dynamic clustering that already exists somewhere?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
very cool finding ... it's inspiring to see how researchers are looking to adapt biological models to technological systems. I think that this kind of work will be[e], ultimately, very productive for helping us to see around the cognitive and material constraints that we have inherited by working from precursor technologies.
I wonder if the same models could be used to improve searching.
If bees are the miracle that is going to make my internet faster I have a problem. I am allergic. Hopefully they will stay in the cable cause if bees start popping out of my computer I am going to have to change careers.
http://ramblinwreck.cstv.com/
Look at the whole picture, not just the hole in the picture.
Why is it that the latest scientific research is always first applied to:
1) war
2) advertising on the net
As long as the researchers don't converse with a bee-like Jerry Seinfield, then I wish them nothing but luck.
won't somebody think of the lavae!?
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
to generate advertising buzz for your website.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Beads
Beads?!
Beers and bottlenecks? I think I will!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I prefer pigeons myself.
The on going mystery of missing bees has finally been solved!
IT Support Guy 1: Well, sure is quiet in here today. IT Support Guy 2: Yes, a little too quiet, if you know what I mean. IT Support Guy 1: Hmm...I'm afraid I don't. IT Support Guy 2: You see, bees usually make a lot of noise. No noise -- suggests no bees! IT Support Guy 1: Oh, I understand now. Oh look, there goes one now. IT Support Guy 2: To the Beemobile! IT Support Guy 1: You mean your Chevy? IT Support Guy 2: Yes.
that when my users complain about slow internet access I can tell them to shake there asses to improve the throughput?
I see somebody else was watching PBS the other night.
TFA: "Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication provides a "beautiful" feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted."
...
Not that they seem to have ways to resolve aspects of the tragedy of the commons, no
"Honey-bee mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm for optimal reservoir operation" ( link)
They help to improve otherways too.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
does the new type of network have stingers? i hate stingers.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
now i know what will speed up the internet, everybody just switch to BeeOS...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The blurb is very misleading, this isn't about serving ads faster, or even about banner ads reporting their load times. It isn't about routing bottlenecks either, it is about distributed loads, and dynamic resource allocation on the server side.
The methodology used is this:
you have a server farm, this server farm is serving up many different sites. Internal to the server farm is an "ad board" for lack of a better term. When Site A's load spikes it's dedicated server can post an ad to the "ad board" which other servers in the farm can see. Then, servers which are dedicated to other sites, but are basically sitting idle can pick up the ad, say "oh I can help out this site over here" and somehow join the load balancing cluster that is server Site A's content. If necessary, the second (and however many other servers) can also place an ad on the board, getting more and more servers included serving up Site A.
As Site A's traffic decreases, less and less servers will be needed, so they will stop posting ads, and fewer and fewer servers will be serving Site A.
This is about dynamically allocating resources across a large data center/cluster not serving ads on the internet or even about optimal routing of traffic on the internet, instead of having a single server dedicated to serving 1 site, you have many servers which dynamically based on load decide which sites to serve.
So, maybe they aren't disappearing at all - the telco's are having them eliminated so the free-netter's can't put the bees to this nefarious use.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070223-bees.html
btw - has anyone made a honeypot joke yet?
ReaLemon is yummy
Hey, it already exists and in widespread use... It's called the ants algorithm.
It was developed by Marco Dorigo at the Free university of brussels http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/HomePageDorigo/
Ants also do a similar thing. The difference is that they release chemicals as they travel. The more ants that travel the same path, the stronger the trail, the more likely the path will continue to be traveled. This also has some consideration for traveling velocity. All other things being equal, a faster (typically shorter) path will have a stronger chemical signature because more ants will traverse it per unit time. Further, new, potentially better, paths will be discovered on rare occasion that an ant gets lost or for some reasons falls off the established path. In artificial simulations this trailblazing can be amplified by increasing the random chance that from any given network hop, the ant/packet will choose some new direction which may be totally random or may be based on other paths that have already been traversed.
As noted before on /., if there's a bottleneck, other cost-effective means are available.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1012_051012_hornet_video.html
The only thing this video is missing is a tiny bee Wilhelm scream
ReaLemon is yummy
If I ever see my routers doing a 'waggle dance', I'm moving to another universe.
there's my 2 bits of dry humor for the day...forgive me
We're in college now. There's girls here. They do stuff....
Bah dum... psssh!
Shouldn't this have been an obvious or apparent extension of RFC 1149 (or RFC 2549, for that matter) when considered in the context of natural behavior and as a proper logic exercise, instead of just a joke? A very senior security engineer and I managed to find all kinds of other interesting implications when laying out a real-world network design by using IP over Avian carriers as an analogy for the data carrying portion of a cellular telecom network, and then expanding into the rest of the forest for descriptions of other portions and functions of a network of that size and complexity. We gleaned some very interesting insights from the exercise... I'm unsurprised that someone found a corollary in the behavior of a beehive - any natural system you study is liable to have similar applications in computing, whether it's circuit design or layer 3, esp. when the system in question involves a social species.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
"... a better Internet traffic algorithms."
Huh?
sigfault (core dumped)
I can't be the only one who read the title as "Beer cans optimize bottlenecks?" and wondered WTF?
More beer cans, more drunk users...drive slowly....surf slowly...whatever.
It seems every month some new study comes out about bees or ants methods being used to improve routing algorithms - I couldn't be bothered finding the older articles (not being an ant, I failed to leave a scent trail through the internet to the articles - nor being a bee, noone's doing funny little dances to tell me where the articles are), but if there are so many 'breakthroughs'... why don't they just read each other's articles?
They're supposed to be the ones to optimize this stuff. Oh well, I guess they'll have to come up with some new goof-ball interview questions. "See, there's a swarm of bees passing through a cloud ..."
Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page.
Can we please have a more productive example of a practical application?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
imsickofshakingmybootyforthesefatjerks?
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.
How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences :)
Stephen Colbert will be out to get the internet in no time (as as soon as the writers strike is over).
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
.. but the Internet is far from ideal. The Internet is not as resilient to attack as it was initially anticipated to be. You can have a single line go down between two sites and even though the sites both have multiple routes in and out, the traffic flow can stop completely due to dumb routing tables, commercial arrangements, and other interests. The Internet is not full of unbiased routers connected together in a mathematically ideal, impartial way. It's more like a social network.. where if two people fall out, communications between friends of those two people can become socially impossible even though it's not physically impossible.
Sounds like a good B2B solution, but won't anyone think of the customers?
The CB App. What's your 20?
EOM
My sysadmin does something similar to the waggle dance everytime a user reports incessant porn pop-ups.
I saw my IT guy try to dance at this year's company Christmas party.
top page of replies. all worthless crap jokes that are not even funny. no matter what the moderation says on it.
just change the name of the site to slashspace or something already.
...to me.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
covered in bees!
Here is the link to the real article at the Georgia Institute of Technology entitled Bee Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly.
It's a shame that /. posted that link from a spammer instead. That spammer always copies a story 1 - 3 months after it was fresh. Probably has something to do with Google-jamming.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The coveredinbees tag seems to be a reference to a skit of his he did during his Glorious tour:
Classic.If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar