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.'"

Comments

An analogy

[ardor]

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.

Re:An analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in the networking sense, he as discovered route poisoning. I bet he will soon discover more fascinating things such as the firebreak to fix vegetation being burned or the embargo to fix uncooperative nations by refusing to cooperate with them.

It's not that I devalue the work. The work is good, its just that math is only a descriptive model yet is often given the accolades of being causal.

Broken leg?

[mjwx]

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.

Re:Broken leg?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point here probably being, that if your route to sydney is misbehaving, losing packets, being otherwise slow etc. you break it even more from the point where it's misbehaving and the system should reroute it around that point.