Researcher Runs IP Network Over Xylophones

joabj writes "Following up on experiments of running Internet Protocol(IP)-based networks with carrier pigeons or bongos, UofC grad student R. Stuart Geiger has demonstrated that it is possible to transmit simple ping requests across two computers using people playing xylophones. Throughput is roughly 1 baud, when the participants don't make any mistakes, or get bored and wander off. The OSI encapsulated model of networking makes this project doable, allowing humans to be inserted at Layer 1, the physical layer. Vint Cerf wasn't kidding when he used to say, 'IP on Everything.'"

Comments

this isn't even cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember doing "networking via scraps of paper" at school.

Writing silly notes since kindergarten and then actually implementing some real protocol in computing classes.

Then a couple of years later an LED, a bit of fibre and an LDR and we were building "fibre networks".

Mind you, this was two decades ago.

Looking even at the "cool" projects which come out of MIT undergrads, I get the impression that almost all children are exposed to absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever before the age of 18.

Re:this isn't even cool

[Hatta]

Looking even at the "cool" projects which come out of MIT undergrads, I get the impression that almost all children are exposed to absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever before the age of 18.

Welcome to education in the US.

Re:they forgot to add parity notes

[TheRealMindChild]

IP doesn't mean TCP/IP. The TCP half is what does the error control. Therefore, a ping wouldn't have error correction... just "appropriately replied/didn't reply appropriately"

Anyone else think of CE3K

[rossdee]

Speilberg thought of communicating using musical notes 35 years ago

Re:Anyone else think of CE3K

[JWSmythe]

    Dude, why did you post anonymous. You would have had a great moderation war.

    Those who see the humor (and fact) in wrote you wrote would mod you up.
    Those see Spielberg as a deity and will do anything to appease him, and mod you down.
    Those who the virgin comment hits just a little too close to home would mod you down.

    My gut instinct is that you would have had at least a couple dozen moderations, and landed at a nice solid "+4 troll" moderation

    I still like the idea I saw a while back about wireless network via lasers. It was basically a laser diode and sensor on each end. they had to be perfectly aligned, and unobstructed. I don't know what kind of throughput they got, but I'd have to guess with the right diodes and drivers, they could probably manage 10Gb/s. Of course, it's a lot easier to just run the fiber, and not suffer from interference when someone put their hand in the data stream. :)

    I'll probably never try it though, because I haven't qualified in the "virgin" category for decades, and reaffirm it regularly.

Re:they forgot to add parity notes

[sourcerror]

Error detection is a Layer 2 responsibility. TCP only does sequence numbers and resends lost packets.

Upcoming Studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Upcoming studies:
Improving Baud: Coffee vs Electroshocks
IP Backbone Implementation Using Michael J. Fox
River Rapids: High-Speed Internet With Riverdancers
Increasing Latency With Rube Goldberg Networks
Replacing LCD Screens With Bored College Students And Etch-a-Sketches
Stone-age Computing: Exploring Completely Inadequate Alternatives To Modern Technology

Re:Upcoming Studies

[jones_supa]

You might also want to check AlgoRythmics, who present various sort algorithms in the form of traditional dance.

Here's a better article....

[Dark$ide]

I stopped reading the article because they can't spell "ACSII".

So a quick Google turns up this Black-boxing the User: Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP)

Re:they forgot to add parity notes

[kheldan]

Play major chords. If a note is incorrect then the chord is dissonant and you have an error condition.

That's a Glockenspiel, not a Xylophone.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article states that the musical instrument has "aluminum keys". From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel :

"[A glockenspiel] is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, thus making it a metallophone."

Re:That's a Glockenspiel, not a Xylophone.

[rubycodez]

And for those who slept in biology, xylem tissue transports water and dissolved nutrients, in a tree it is the wood. The word comes from the Greek xylon, which means wood. So a xylophone must be wooden.

Re:only 1 baud?

[msauve]

The baud rate is insignificant of throughput, it's not clear why it was even mentioned, especially in relation to throughput. Each note encodes 4 bits (a hex digit), so although it does run at 1 baud, the system runs at 4 bps.

Your math is way off. With 8 notes, each encodes 3 bits; two notes allow 64 different combinations (not 1.6 million!), or 6 bits.

One baud? What does that mean?

[swillden]

Baud is a measure of symbols per second, so it's meaningless unless the amount of information per symbol is defined.

In this case, it turns out that a symbol is a hexadecimal value, so the data rate is about 4 bits per second.

Somethings smells funny at Vint Cerf's place

[Chainsaw]

"'IP on Everything." Sounds like his office is a really disgusting place.

Re:It needs an acronym!

[arcsimm]

That's a no-go -- the trademark is already registered to Apple's biological weapons division.

Re:Increased speed with solenoids & FFT

[gman003]

Because it's fun?

Re:UofC?

[catmistake]

In California, we call it UC Berkeley.

i.e. yoo see burr clee, and even that is incorrect, as the town and the school where named after Bishop Berkeley of "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" fame. His name is pronounced BAR clee.

/pedant

Re:they forgot to add parity notes

[19thNervousBreakdown]

"Ping"

"Your tits look nice today."

Replied very inappropriately!

Video demonstration of IP over Xylophone Players

[Cito]

Here is the video demonstration that didn't get posted in the original article:

Video: http://youtu.be/qCT7SisWh38

Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP) situates humans at the lowest layers of the Internet. Read the full paper at http://www.stuartgeiger.com/ipoxp.pdf. A project by R. Stuart Geiger, Yoon Jeong, and Emily Manders at the University of California, Berkeley. Presented at alt.CHI 2012.

Re:they forgot to add parity notes

[skids]

Really they didn't implement IP-over-xylophone -- you cannot, because there is no provision in the IP standard for framing between packets. They implemented some as-yet-undisclosed link layer protocol, and then ran IP over it. They could just as easily have run DECNET. Since they gave no details of the link layer protocol, we don't know if it had checksum support.

IP over black holes

[aviancarrier]

As a followon to my rfc1149 and rfc2549, I considered doing IP over black holes: if you carefully control matter being dropped into a black hole, you can modulate the huge X-ray emissions as the matter is ripped apart. This would be detectable over huge distances.