Slashdot Mirror
Ants Build Cheapest Networks
schliz writes "When building a network from scratch, Argentine ants tend to connect their nests in the way that, while more inconvenient for individual ants, requires the minimum amount of trail. Researchers studying 'supercolonies' of the ants found them building networks that closely resembled the mathematical shortest path — a Steiner tree. They hope to apply their work to self-healing, organic computing networks of self-organising sensors, robots, computers, and autonomous cars." This story adds to the earlier report of ants' networking prowess.
Self-healing, organized organic networks of robots. What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe ants play netwalk?
And yet, the O'Reilly TCP/IP book has a crab on the front.
that's the replicators not skynet
Steiner trees are an example of a class of problems where perfect solutions are difficult to compute but near-optimal solutions are simple. I suspect that the ants are using some set of heuristics that would provide close to optimal solutions. The more interesting thing really is how the ants are able to do this in a completely decentralized fashion having essentially only local knowledge. However, this is not the first example of that sort of thing: ants produce very complicated systems of tunnels using only localized rules. When you've got millions of years of evolution, you develop efficient solutions.
"Anthill inside"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Humans do this too... where haven't you been where someone designed a sidewalk pathway that isn't the shortest path, and there isn't a worn away-grass path that people created because of seeking the shortest path.
Ant colony optimization
And yet, the O'Reilly TCP/IP book has a crab on the front.
That's a metaphor for the crabs one gets from fucking sluts.
You see, it's a network: one guy fucks the slut and other guys fucks her and creates a network of crab infestations.
Now, they wouldn't sell many books if they put a herpes virus on the cover, would they.
Geeze!
More immigrants coming in on H1's stealing IT jobs!
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Thants
Look Around You.
I'm here!! One of my minions told me, the overlord with IBM Watson, about this article. :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Discworld already did it.
Or maybe we're just underestimating the intelligence of soap
Your anti-ant sentiment is not really patriotic, you know.
The 2nd picture of trails in the article shows trail lengths which are longer than if each nest were directly connected, even if they did add another vertex to the middle.
And I, for one, welcome our Thrifty Networking Building Ant Overlords...
By ants!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Oh good, because it would be great to own an organic device that suddenly develops an ant death spiral while using it. Especially the brain of a car.
We followed this branch of thought in the 80's when it was first discovered that ants find shortest path by the decay of pheromones along their trails. Calculating timestamps on packet switched circuits to solve shortest-path and calculate routing was experimented with for several years. It was decided that the processing cost was too high for the small benefits gained over our new IS-IS standard and the researched was ended. Maybe today, the extra 3-5% would be worth the cost.
Don't worry about us (southamerican people) coming all the way over there, i can steal your job from here, if fact, now that i think of it, i actually am stealing IT jobs, i work for less that US$ 1000 a month (and i just got promoted in January, before that it was like US$600) making web apps that are used all over the world
Buzzwords, we hate them and love them for all their hype and overzealous implications.
Yet more and more we are seeing today buzzconcepts as almost a duality: autonomous vehicles, self-healing compounds, nano-particle super virus fighter robot simulations, cloud-computing [insert addition here], etc. These are all very relevant concepts and require a large convergence of many scientific disciplines, but why can't we just enjoy these studies and speculate ourselves (or at least a bit less in the headline)?
Today, when reading headlines, I feel as if I am headed downtown in my car passing largely lit fast-food signs: encouraging further participation in science is great but forming application-based "bridges" as a justification for the science is flawed thinking. Now I am not (entirely) naive here, I understand (somewhat) how research grants are given, but looking for specifics in observation can cause one to miss the obvious.
No the world is not going to end for me and I understand I am crabby way beyond my age, but when reading many of these articles today I cannot help but conclude that the author would consider the topic he/she is working on boring had he/she not heard of the potential world-changing applications.
Now about the article, for those who have not read it yet but look to the comments first: it is good read, do it. (funny, I know reading) But honestly on Slashdot I did not need to be dazzled with some sensationalist headline... come to think of it this would have sufficed:
---
Ants build Steiner Trees
"When building a network from scratch, Argentine ants tend to connect their nests in the way that, while more inconvenient for individual ants, requires the minimum amount of trail and investments of ant pheromones. Researchers studying 'supercolonies' of the ants found them building networks that closely resembled the mathematical shortest path — a Steiner tree. The article states that individual "nodes were controlled individually and not by a central control unit." This may prove useful in fields such as self organizing sensors and network nodes."
---
Sorry for that rant but did they really think that...
‘supercolonies’ of Argentine ants with 500, 1000 or 2000 workers
...would be of any help in modeling autonomous Chicago traffic?
I think not.
Have a nice day. /endrant
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
It was a joke, and I like outsourcing if it is cheaper. In-sourcing, notsomuch, since it often is more expensive, at least with unskilled labor.
And when you graduate from an American law school, then, maybe I will be concerned about you stealing my job.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Proverbs 6:6. Go to the ant, you lazy one; see its ways and become wise.
the xenu story is full of references to implants and scientology gave me one for torture
Reminds me of this: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/
Some researchers placed food sources in the same configuration as Tokyo Rail stations and then introduced a slime mold. From TFA
Initially, the slime mold dispersed evenly around the oat flakes, exploring its new territory. But within hours, the slime mold began to refine its pattern, strengthening the tunnels between oat flakes while the other links gradually disappeared. After about a day, the slime mold had constructed a network of interconnected nutrient-ferrying tubes. Its design looked almost identical to that of the rail system surrounding Tokyo, with a larger number of strong, resilient tunnels connecting centrally located oats. “There is a remarkable degree of overlap between the two systems,” Fricker says.
My MS thesis was right up this alley; titled "Automated Radio Network Design Using Ant Colony Optimization"
We represented the network design problem as a GSTS (generalized Steiner tree-star) problem, and programmatically let thousands of ants traverse the network looking for optimal designs.
Here's the final thesis paper, a conference poster, and thesis defense presentation for anyone interested:
http://jsharkey.org/thesis-draft2.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/downloads/trb-jsharkey.pdf/poster-jsharkey.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/
Oh, and we also open-sourced it under GPLv3:
http://libprop.jsharkey.org/
http://code.google.com/p/libprop/
http://code.google.com/p/aco-netdesign/
My MS thesis was right up this alley; titled "Automated Radio Network Design Using Ant Colony Optimization"
We represented the network design problem as a GSTS (generalized Steiner tree-star) problem, and programmatically let thousands of ants traverse the network looking for optimal designs.
Here's the final thesis paper, a conference poster, and thesis defense presentation for anyone interested:
http://jsharkey.org/thesis-draft2.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/downloads/trb-jsharkey.pdf/poster-jsharkey.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/
Oh, and we also open-sourced it under GPLv3:
http://libprop.jsharkey.org/
http://code.google.com/p/libprop/
http://code.google.com/p/aco-netdesign/
My MS thesis was right up this alley; titled "Automated Radio Network Design Using Ant Colony Optimization"
We represented the network design problem as a GSTS (generalized Steiner tree-star) problem, and programmatically let thousands of ants traverse the network looking for optimal designs.
Here's the final thesis paper, a conference poster, and thesis defense presentation for anyone interested:
http://jsharkey.org/thesis-draft2.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/downloads/trb-jsharkey.pdf/poster-jsharkey.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/
Oh, and we also open-sourced it under GPLv3:
http://libprop.jsharkey.org/
http://code.google.com/p/libprop/
http://code.google.com/p/aco-netdesign/
My MS thesis was right up this alley; titled "Automated Radio Network Design Using Ant Colony Optimization"
We represented the network design problem as a GSTS (generalized Steiner tree-star) problem, and programmatically let thousands of ants traverse the network looking for optimal designs.
Here's the final thesis paper, a conference poster, and thesis defense presentation for anyone interested:
http://jsharkey.org/thesis-draft2.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/downloads/trb-jsharkey.pdf/poster-jsharkey.pdf
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/
Oh, and we also open-sourced it under GPLv3:
http://libprop.jsharkey.org/
http://code.google.com/p/libprop/
http://code.google.com/p/aco-netdesign/
it's a rough time in the IT biz when you're looking for a creature that can be taken out with a magnifying glass to fix your networks...
My isp charges a bomb for installation of last mile.
What we want to know here is: Do they have Net Neutrality!
.sigh
It all boils down to becoming self healing in the end, and being able to fix ruptures in whatever was created with this material.
The material can self heal based off certain molecules that would be passed off from the surface area from one "sector" to another....
this would require a mapping of what the quickest road would be to send the molecules to fix the wound...or rupture.
This would obviously use nano tech to do what it needs to do such as programming to know what road is the shortest etc....but in essence, the same as the ants.
Assuming this post will take, becauase this new forum is EFFING AWFUL and I can barely use this site at all anymore but I was just so mad at Slashdotters for being so clueless here. Sigh. People talk as though ants have some sort of path-finding algorith in their head, which is not at all true, ants are really dumb. In fact, individual ants seem to move about in a way that's barely more efficient than random. What ants are good at, however, is leaving and following scent trails. So every single moron leaves behind a faint trail as to everywhere it's gone. Other wandering ants stop, consider this trail, maybe follow it for a second, then drop off and do their own thing. Until, for example, they find food. Then the ant leaves a stronger trail, and tries to get the food home, very inefficiently. But two other ants smell this trail, and they try to take food home too. Minutes later, some ant finally wanders home. Then some other ant is close to home, smells his trail, and makes it home too. Give it a couple minutes, and all of a sudden there's only one trail- the shortest path gets the heaviest scent marking over time, so that eventually the ants are marching single-file on a highway of stink that's completely irresistable to them. When I helped out the University of Kentucky supercomupting department building the KASY0 computer, they had KLAT-2 doing a version of this- simulating random network traffic traveling over KASY0, but over time patterns would be established until you approached a network of shortest paths, you just keep trimming least-used paths until you have the most cost-efficient network. So, this sort of thing has been known for quite a while, the only invention here is adding "Steiner tree" to the discussion, which as someone else pointed out isn't new either. A great solution to shortest-path problems seems to be assuming no intelligence whatsoever, and just adding a little time to the mix. And yes, this means sometimes a colony will not build a shortest path, because maybe an area is too clogged so a bypass naturally grows somewhere else as flustered ants try going off-road. Over time, again, random fluctuations lead to evolution of the paths, and the ants get the most cost-effective network possible- least calories expended to get food back home.
"The ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords." 1F13 96 - 515 (Deep Space Homer)
If you are building an N core processor (with local memory), and want to connect it to other N core processors to form a supercluster computer, then you have interconnect busses that follow the shortest path (fastest inter-core data travel time, lowest power dissipation, etc). If you took their 2D model and converted it to 3D (and had clickable build-as-you-go modules), you could assemble a very powerful computer. Cooling and power would have to be integrated into each clickable module. So which comes first: quantum computing, or computers who's compute nodes snap together like Lego bricks (oh, and the joy is also that you can take them apart, re-arrange them, and put them back together to better suit your needs).
By ants!
Wearing sneakers.
Ponder Stibbons figured this out a long time ago....this is why HEX is so efficient
See here: http://myrmecos.net/2011/02/20/how-do-ants-find-the-shortest-path/ ... :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).