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If a Network Is Broken, Break It More
New submitter Aras Esor writes "When a network is broken — an electrical grid, the World Wide Web, your neurological system — one math model created by a PhD student at Northwestern University suggests that the best way to fix it may be to break it a little more. 'Take the web of interactions within a cell. If you knock out an important gene, you will significantly damage the cell's growth rate. However, it is possible to repair this damage not by replacing the lost gene, which is a very challenging task, but by removing additional genes. The key lies in finding the specific changes that would bring a network from the undesirable state A to the preferred state B. Cornelius's mathematical model (abstract) provides a general method to pinpoint those changes in any network, from the metabolism of a single cell to an entire food web.'"
... network break YOU!!!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If it IS broke.... don't fix it.
Yah, sure, duct tape and bailing wire is best with consideration to budget problems....
The plate is chipped. She resents me gluing it back together. So she breaks it real good so I gotta go out and buy an entire new set.
my company's IT department has figured this out a long time ago
(Are those genes selfish? Because if so, this) may be a classic case of resolving a Braess's paradox by removing a trigger for selfish behaviour.
(now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go to RTFA)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Reminds me of software bugs which are "fixed" by disabling subsystems around them. Example: in a media player, AAC playback sometimes freezes and causes glitches. Solution: disable AAC playback, ensuring that the media player does not reach this undefined and broken state.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
stupid windows 8.1 can't buffer a flash video enough to watch (without freezing)on a slow connection no more.
And then the next time something break, just break even more.
I'm sure that system will be sustainable for decades without ever encountering any issue that can't be solved by breaking yet more.
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Thats called cancer
So if I have one broken leg, the best solution is to break another leg and maybe an arm?
Mechanical and electrical problems are radically different to biological ones as they dont self heal/mutate.
With a cell, you're attempting to force it into a reaction by breaking it more. We do this because we dont have the knowledge or experience to fix it ourselves. With networks it's the opposite, isolate the damage, route around it if need be and then fix the broken components. Yes that's a simple view, but the basis for fixing network issues.
If my route to Sydney is down, deliberately breaking my route to Melbourne wont help if there is a physical cable problem or some idiot down in the NOC changed the route cost to 10000 on the router. Nope, instead of one route to Australia down, I now have two.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Nuke 'em all, then there will no problems. Well, nobody to complain about them anyway.
We had a broken TV and could return it to slightly better functionality by punching the side.
An explanation of why they followed XP with Vista
"However, it is possible to repair this damage not by replacing the lost gene, which is a very challenging task, but by removing additional genes."
This sounds like a horrible idea, which will in 99.9% of cases just lead to more broken sub networks..
This guy basically came up with "damage mitigation" and a way to highlight a "critical path"? -essentially if something is broken to disable everything that relies on the something and carry on in limited capacity.
The model might be perfectly workable but the ambiguous "undesirable state A" etc is going to be nearly impossible to implement.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
So if one considers the weight distribution the bulkheads in the ill-fated Titanic as a "network" perhaps it would have been possible to save her (or at least keep her afloat long enough for the Carpathia to rescue all the passengers) by further "damaging" it.
While it has been often said that she could withstand any two bulkheads being flooded, in truth she could take many more, various simulations show that she could take at least four being flooded, in various combinations. And this was with them being COMPLETELY flooded (up to the top of the bulkhead partitions); if she were on a more even keel they would only flood to the water level.
The problem of course is that the Titanic was NOT on an even keel. When the compartments, all in the front, were flooded that caused her to pitch down. The water kept rising until it went OVER the bulkhead partition, flooding the next. This caused the weight in the front to increase even more which caused her to pitch even further and ... you get the picture.
So, thinking of this like a damaged "network"; perhaps if the captain had flooded one of the far aft bulkheads (breaking the network more), the Titanic would not have pitched downward as much and the water wouldn't have overflowed the bulkheads (they were not watertight, water could go over the partitions). This might have prevented the cascading effect which led to the sinking of the world's largest ship just two and a half hours later.
Would she still have sunk if they flooded one of the aft compartments? Maybe but it might have happened much more slowly and gently (no scenes of people falling down a nearly vertical ship!). And if the downward pitch was reduced so much that the water didn't surmount the bulkheads (the partitions separating them were quite high, much higher than the normal water level), maybe she would have remained afloat!
The builder (designer?) of the boat was on her when she sank, I wonder if he considered this? Or did the thought of damaging the boat further never cross his mind?
Send your backups offsite.
And don't forget to de-dupe ;)
So if it's true, can we apply it to every other aspect of our lives? How about applying it to a society? If there is something bad about the society, the only way to fix it is to make it worse, by taking out more goodness from the society, until it reaches a point where it's 'good' again? Who defines what's good and what's not in this case?
is now HULK FIX
Perhaps moving them all aft would have been sufficient to keep the boat balanced too !?
I used to work (in telecom) with a guy who always said "If you can't fix it, then fix it so no one can fix it". Same principal I guess.
So, if I have cancer, you are telling me I should get a little more cancer?
Great, I will get right on it. The more cancers, the better, they will all cancel out eventually and I will look like some vomit that has dried in through the night.
Sexy as fuck.
What if the network was "broke" that way for a good reason?
The researcher just discovered the reason to drink more: broken neural nets require some more breaking to work again.
Cornelius's model implies breaking the system down until there is only five elements left.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If this guy had ever worked IT, he'd know that if you have a serious problem that needs to be solved NOW, and you are already dead-in-the-water, this is 100% standard practice, and something that is self-evident without the help of a mathematical model.
I used to work Enterprise-level tech-support for a large maker of computer equipment, and our first response to a customer that was complaining he was essentially out of business until his computers were back online was to request he reboot plausible sources of the problem until things started working again. (Pulling a logset first if he could spare the time and didn't want it to happen again.) Unless the problem is obvious, this is usually the fastest way to fix things unless you care about root cause.
I don't see the practical application of something like this in a physical networked environment. Thinks like this may sound nice for permastudents' theses, but may or may not have a practical use without one hell of a architectural and best practices shift rather than just replacing a failed piece of equipment or rectifying a software issue and closing the ticket?
I hate sigs.
I confess, when I first read the summary, my first thought was that it was speaking to the problem where something is broken, but management won't allocate the time/money/resources to fix it.
(Misinterpreted) solution: Break it more (presumably without evidence of doing so), thus forcing the morons to authorize the repair.
But the article's actual meaning (fixing a break with an unorthodox-approach) is interesting too...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is the same basic logic that's employed by Skynet and most other fictional rampant AI.
The IT department at work does that all the time!
The only thing worse than a failure is an unknown or inconsistent behavior.
When a general failure happens, you know about it quickly and can address and contain problem. Silent data corruption can cause much more severe and costly systemic failure further down your process chain.
It could work. Internet is broken as US government decided that noone (at least, non-americans) deserves privacy. Now consider privacy (at least, whatever you in private) as intellectual property, then decide that noone (at least, american) deserves intellectual property, and you will find plenty of corporations forcing US to consider going back in the no privacy idea.
This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've heard.
isn't a broken network actually NOT a network anymore? so by "breaking" something that is not a network might turn it into a network? ...
i'm gonna go "break" some bricks into a new wall now
but it detects carrier just fine, so if the hardware is only checking for carrier and not actively testing throughput it won't detect a problem.
The solution is to shut down the link totally in order to force the failover mechanisms to pick a different link.
we do this at the board level on h/w all the time when manufacturing h/w (PC boards, graphics carss etc.). If a failure is not obvious or intermittent you change things until it is fully broken and easier to find and fix. It is especially useful in engineering investigations.
Makes perfect sense. If it is too broken to fix - refactor it.
Is this how chiropractors work? I just spent two hours in electro-therapy and spinal re-adjustment. Break the network to fix it, indeed!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
TFS and to a degree, TFA missed it. They don't claim that they have suddenly discovered this property, they claim new analysis tools that help to determine what to break and where to break it to return a non-linear network to some reasonable stable state.
For example, if the power grid suffers a de-stabilizing loss, what needs to be done to move it to a stable state rather than allowing it to go into a cascade failure. We have some tools for that already, and in fact, power is re-routed and load is dropped all the time in order to stabilize things. Better tools suggest either getting to the answer faster, finding the least damaging way to reach stability (the least customers dropped) or better certainty that the actions taken will prevent dropping the whole grid.
Nobody is claiming it's OK to leave it in that state. In fact, the same analysis tools might help to make sure that the repairs don't inadvertantly destabilize the grid again as parts go back on-line.
I think I heard somewhere (early 1990's IIRC) that someone did a study with a neural network where they randomly disconnected nodes (I can't remember what type of neural network it was). At first, the output was gibberish, but when more nodes were disconnected, the output resembled things that were some of the first things the network had learned. Someone likened this to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey where when HAL was gradually being shut down, HAL recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb"