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."

Comments

Um...

[varmittang]

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.

Re:Um...

[cgenman]

Then what is going to the honeypots?

Re:Um...

[maxwell demon]

Bears.

Behold the power of bees

[Sciros]

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.

ads are the culprit

[toQDuj]

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.

No joking...

[tgd]

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.

Re:No joking...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, fuck that! I would punch every bee in the face! Bees aren't taking me out, I'd be like, "FUCK YOU BEE!" *PUNCH* I'm not going out that way.

Trying to take the sting out of this news,

[blueZ3]

Internet researchers get hives investigating honey of an optimization tool

Slashdot Uses Bees to generate faster Dupes

[Mike Morgan]

From November

True breakthrough

[bwintx]

Talk about a way to get "buzz" for your Web site...

Web 2.0

[ruiner13]

Bees make the best web 2.0 buzzwords. They're the buzziest! I blame the hive mentality of the marketing drones for this.

Oh no, what's next?

[bluemonq]

Dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they optimize your local network and find rogue wireless access points?

Did anyone else read that as...

[Overzeetop]

"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.

Re:Did anyone else read that as...

[morgan_greywolf]

Beer? Alcohol? Beer isn't alcohol, it's basic nutrition!

And, sure, beer can optimize networks. Drink enough and watch how fast everything whizzes by you!

This works great...

[syntaxeater]

...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.

Re:This works great...

[gudnbluts]

Which is why the research failed when conducted by analysing the waggle dances of more intelligent species - in this case strippers.

bees at GT, eh?

[PurpleButter]

And by "bees", they clearly mean "Yellow Jackets"

http://ramblinwreck.cstv.com/

Did you ever notice

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that the latest scientific research is always first applied to:
1) war
2) advertising on the net

Re:OMG! Bees!

[red_dragon]

Now we'll have routers do the wiggly bee dance

If a big Cisco or Juniper is running WDRP (Wiggly Dance Routing Protocol), does each line card do a different dance from the other cards in the chassis? What would such a router be called then, a hoedown? If the line cards started dancing "Thriller", will the router turn white and start chatting to young boys on IM?

Re:What's the deal with honey bees?

[Applekid]

Which should be fine so long as they aren't florists with a beestiality complex.

Beers?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Beers and bottlenecks? I think I will!

There are better carriers than bees...

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer pigeons myself.

Re:What's the MTU of your average Bee?

[theRiallatar]

African or European?

Shouldn't this have been obvious...

[s13g3]

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.