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Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bee-all-that-you-can-bee dept.

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."

4 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Um... by varmittang · · Score: 5, Funny

    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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    1. Re:Um... by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bears.

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  2. Slashdot Uses Bees to generate faster Dupes by Mike+Morgan · · Score: 5, Funny

    From November

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  3. Ants have a similar behavior by cyngus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.