Chaos Theory Applied To Netwok Data Transmission

Gentry writes "Researchers tout 125 MB throughput by applying chaos theory to fiberoptic data transmission. Certainly still a conceptual technology, but the article outlines some interesting potential. "

Comments

Whoo Hoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Coolio, faster kernel downloads, too!

Re: Whoo Hoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

People must understand the difference between MB and Mb and mb and mB. They are all different. The artical says 125 megabites or Mb. The SlashDot artical says 128 MB/s which is 8 times fasrter then 128Mb/s. Bits and Bytes...you computer people should write the correct things.

Computer thinking for themselves?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would they say about the OS they're running? :)

Netwok

[Anonymous Coward]

So, does this mean I can stir-fry from a remote site now? Come on, guys, you really need to work on your spelling if you're even dreaming about making a buck at this.

Specious

[Anonymous Coward]

/*How the Hell do you get chaotic information from a laser, one of the finest examples of coherence and organization in the physical world?*/

Well you could fire the laser through a bucket of swirling sugar water. It's seems that they are intentially randomizing the laser source.

I read that Gleik book a while back and vaguely remeber that there have already been applications of chaos theory to data transmision in phones (I think)

read, then do math, THEN reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do read first.

In the 6th paragraph it spells out "megabits" in lower case letters, with the digits "125" preceding

Either way (125Mb/s or 125MB/s) I'm not impressed.

What the?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're talking about compression. They have to be talking about compression. What manner of compression is irrelevent. BS and wild expectations are emerging properties of any chaotic system. It would help to have a technical analisys of these idea rather then some twit speaking in nonsensical generalities.

Chaos Theory Applied To Netwok Data Transmission

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a Netwok? Is it a wok that doubles as a net? I don't get it.

i hate dumb science writers

[Anonymous Coward]

chaos theory != study of fractals

I hate the fact that writers continually
write for an audience with only a 10th
grade education. And if they are aren't
trying to water something down, they
completely blow it because most are never
trained in science. The result, dumb statements.

what is the difference between a bit and a byte

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is a pretty dumb question, but can someone enlighten me? Thanks!

-too embarrased to log in :)

what is the difference between a bit and a byte

[Anonymous Coward]

a byte does not equal 8 bits? So then what does it equal? :(

read article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, then it's odd that the article says megabits: "Rajarshi Roy, professor of physics at Georgia Tech, reports that he has sent data at 125 megabits per second"

Chaos Theory Applied To Netwok Data Transmission

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever it is, I'm sure that someone has patented it and is asking for a 1% royalty on each netwok sale. In addition to the royalties being demanded, I believe that Microsoft is being investigated by a senate sub-panel for anti-competitive practices against other netwok software providers. A large coalition of anti-Microsoft netwok users will be holding a large demonstration against the EUNSA (End User Netwok Software Agreement) that Microsoft issues with each copy of their Wok 98, Wok 95, or Wok NT software that is bundled with new netwoks.

Chaotic signals

[Anonymous Coward]

No WAY.

The chaos theory is just a mathematicians game.
Its totally useless in real life and technicians.

When the 1000th digit MAKES a difference then
you can't work with it.

The 'chaos theory' and 'the butterfly example' is
just a crap to get the attention of those who don't know.

I am aware that if right now i throw a bottle out of the window I am changing the entire history but there is no prediction in it.

So let give ourselves a break here.

There is something wrong with the article

[Anonymous Coward]

125Mbps over a fiber isn't such a big deal.

Our current INTERNET backbone is being converted
from OC12 (155Mbps) to OC48 (620 Mbps).
The maximum speed using electronic technology is
OC192 (2.48Gbps), after that you must switch
to purely optical technology (such as optical
amplifiers). At the present time OC12 and OC48
are rather trivial rates (you can purchase
ATM OC48 adapter for your PC or Sparcstation from
FORE Technologies).

Another interesting bit of information
is that with the existing
fiber technologies and the media, the estimated
maximum bandwidth is in the range of 20Tbps
(20 Terabits per second).

OC Speeds?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, OC3 is 155Mbps, OC12 is 622Mbps, and OC-48 is 2.488Mbps.

Tis real

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry naysayers, but I have followed Prof. Roy's research with more than a passing interest for quite some time. It's real and the research is valid. I'd suggest you hit his web page before being so dismissive. Chaos makes a huge amount of sense for communication because it can be very bandwidth efficient, if done properly - which is something Roy and Ditto are well aware of. The use of a chaotic code generator is an issue separate from the carrier generator, although in some schemes the same oscillator (laser) can be used.

And, I'd also suggest a review of his earlier work on controlling chaos in lasers. The breakdown at high power is a classic descent into chaos. By controlling the chaos, higher powers are achieved. A fundamental limitation of lasers is the power that they can deliver. So, lasers are not the simple linear toys you cookbook engineers think they are.

a bit, a nibble, a byte, a word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, this is why TAOCP is so handy (and
people do so unfairly slam the use of
assembly language)!

Okay, a bit is the smallest unit in
binary - a zero or one. Off or on.
The discrete nature of this (no halfsies
here!) is what makes the computer
digital. Imagine a switch than can
be toggled off or on based on a signal.
Such are the fundamental transistors
at the heart of your CPU.

Now, a cluster of 4 bits is a nibble,
or "nybble" to some, and the 16 unique
states of the nibble could be used as
instructions for simpler computers. I
seem to recall that fuzzy logic used
4 bits in a kind of "quadbit" which
was meant to kludge the old yes-no
dichotomy which I think the fuzzy
logic people disliked on a philosophical
level. Anyway, 16 states can be
represented handily by hexadecimal,
but I digress. But remember the hex
stuff (0=0, 1=1, ... 9=9, 10=A, ... 16=F).

8 bits allows for 256 unique states.
256, hmmm, sounds like ASCII to me!
So, since it's handy to know how many
ASCII characters a file might have,
memory usage units are defined in
terms of how many of those 8 bit
characters there are. That's why
the convention is 8 bits in a byte.
It's only a convention, though. It
can vary.

Now a word is a basic unit of data
for a computer, that is to say, a
chunk of zeroes and ones that goes
through the CPU. Typically a word
has a bit of code that tells the
computer what to do with the rest
of the zeroes and ones in the word:
store it at an address, add it, etc.

A 32 bit computer defines a word
as 32 bits, that is, 4 bytes. When
you have a core dump, you see a bunch
of hexadecimal numbers. Recall that
4 bits can be represented by a hex
value. So it takes two hex numbers
to represent a byte. So eight hex
numbers would show you what zeroes
and ones are crunched by your CPU.

Back in the old days of PEEK and
POKE, you would mess around with
all these hex values and addresses
because that's how you got down to
doing machine level code. Below that
was assembly and below *that*, well,
you're doing a Spock and programming
on raw iron.

I am sorry if I'm not making sense.
To you. I make sense to me, but I'm
uncertain if I make sense to you!

Quantum Weirdness

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to as though quantum "weirdness"( a.k.a Electron Spin Memory) is probably the better choice for the data communications of the future. Quantum weirdness has also been demonstrated and proven in laboratory setting, and is instantaneous, it has no speed threshhold. Using quantum "weirdness" would "teleport" the data. Any thoughts???

CNN: A year late and a URL short.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since CNN was not kind enough to provide any links to the original information, here it is:
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/news/papers.html

Note that this story is almost a YEAR old (the original paper was published in Science in February last year).

CNN - "We will report no news before it's time."

Chaotic signals

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the pseudorandom signals are not input,
the chaos is generated by the intrinsic physics
of the erbium-doped fiber laser, and the reciever laser automagically synchronizes onto the transmitted signal, and from there you can extract the modulated information. Everything is being
done "by the physics".

How do I know this? I'm one of their collaborators. Here at UCSD we're working on some mathematical modelling of the system.

This work is clearly just in the initial "proof of concept stage". The real point is that the fiber lasers themselves have a very wide amplification bandwidth (10 THz) but that it is not easy to modulate and detect information.

If this were to be applied in practice, one would spend $$$ to design specialized detection and demodulation hardware.

The current performance we observed is very far from any physical bandwidth limitations---rather it's a function of the detector and data acquisition hardware.

As far as "chaotic communications" goes it's a nice achievement.

The take-home message is that there are all sorts of potential communication schemes that go beyond the standard ones, some of which might turn out to
have some unusual and unique advantages.

We're just at the beginning of the road---we don't claim to be able to beat Lucent's record tomorrow---but we want to open minds.

The other stuff in the CNN article about chaotic computation et cetera was quite garbled as far as I know.

Nothing really new

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying chaos to data transmission is nothing new, there was reserach done over twenty years ago by B. Mandelbrot I believe who discovered that chaos occurs in wires and in many cases follows the Cantor set.

Netwok

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah man...Netwok...an Ewok SysAdmin...

flashy fluff article w no actual content

[Anonymous Coward]

go to the article, replace every instance of the word 'chaos' with the word 'magic'. it makes
about as much sense. there is no explanation
and nothing in depth or informative. its the same
old 'science as orgasm' buttery crap writing
reminiscent of old newsreels from popular science.. promising everything and delivering nothing.

heres just one example.
"It would eliminate any scarcity in the ability to transmit information," Carter says."You would never have to wait for anything to download and you could use capacity on demand."
any amount of storage or capacity can be filled
easily. it is not infinite.

20 years ago many ignorant people probably
viewed a 10 gig hard drive as 'infinite'
of course we know thats ridiculous, and saying
this will release us from the pesky theories
of matter we currently deal with is ridiculous.

a bit, a nibble, a byte, a word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eeek!!!

Yes, 15=F and 16=10...
I am mortified! Simply mortified!

Study of fractals?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the person who wrote this article do any research on chaos at all. Since when has Chaos been known as the study of factals? True, some (not all) fractals are maps of chaotic systems, but thats like saying algebra is the study of graphs. Also, they've screwed up the statement about Lorenz. The Lorenz attractor is hardly random, though it is chaotic. And since when has artificial intelligence benefitted from chaos theory. If any field has benefitted from chaos theory it's encryption(or something, not artificial intelligence.)

Calm down, it's only Basic Research.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we certainly know that there exists conventional communications systems which go faster.

The experiment was only to try the method, it is quite far (15 years) from anything you can hook into your computer.

There was *no* attempt to perform any sort of optimization or development to improve the bitrate, and the lab equipment is really unable to go much faster than we have it now. As far as we can tell, the limitation is in our equipment, not in the physical dynamics of the thing---down there we believe there is still oodles of bandwidth left.

We're exploring interesting and cool ideas. To me the fact that it even works at all is amazing, as we thought of all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't as we started the project.


I'm a collaborator (read 'useless theoretical physicist who writes software while the lab dudes ignore most of whatever I say and make it work anywhow') with Greg van Wiggeren (the very smart grad student who really thought up lots of the stuff needed to make it work) and Raj Roy.

matt
mbkennel@yahoo.com

If you spam this email, I will hate you.

Even more philosophical than that...

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO the most sensible interpretation of QM is the Everett Interpretation, in which no superluminal transfer of information happens at all.

Not familiar with that interpretation? Works like this: You are made of stuff that obeys QM. Therefore you follow the rules of QM. So when you observe a QM event (or the half-dead cat), you go into a superposition of states. Since for sound thermodynamic reasons an irreversible observation implies that there will be no interference of states, QM predicts that the two halves of the superposition are unable to meaningfully interact.

So, about the EPR effect. Two sets of observers. Each observe something. Each splits into a superposition. Then when they get back together all that QM says is which experimenter A meets which B. And hola! What they were seeing showed superluminal communication!

Not.

It just allowed each to predict the results of late subluminal commication.

Cheers,
Ben Tilly

PS As Einstein proved long ago, superluminal communication in all reference frames is impossible. OTOH superluminal communication vs the average reference frame of our galaxy could be another question...

You stupid moron!

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid moron you dont even now how to use a question mark!?


I hatea all you slashdotters who dont know how to punctuate or how to spell or who don't have aything to contribute to the general discussion of the various posts that exist here on SlashDot,

Chaotic signals

[Anonymous Coward]

And I follow both Prof. Roy's work and the Institute for Nonlinear Science @ UCSD. The work at both institutions is incredible and the results are real. As noted, this is early science, but in a few years, watch out. You cookbook engineers ought to spend more time reading scientific journals instead of watching TV and Star Tacky movies.

The Wright Brothers couldn't lift an extra 10 pounds of payload, but look what became of their little demonstration. Same thing here. Stay tuned.

Tis real

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of running to your cookbooks and flapping your gums, check out some of the research:

Institute for Nonlinear Science (UCSD)
http://www.zweb.com/apnonlin/

NRL
http://code6343.nrl.navy.mil/

and the Ga. Tech Site

The research is real, valid, and important.

It Does work that way ...kinda...

[Anonymous Coward]

As the original poster of this message earlier, I wish to clarify. Here is the system: In an atom, an electron can have either a +spin (, and a -spin). Okay, this + and - have no real value beyond explaining their state. Two electorns can only exist in the same valance path if they have opposite spins. (We cannot observe which is which, without our observation causing a change in the spin (kida like the Dead Cat). But after we wipe one out (Kick it off it's shell), we can determine which spin the other one had, because the other left will lock into the exact opposite spin of the one removed, and our observation will not disturb this. Confused yet??? Anyways, take two sets of these eletrons in a two systems distant from each other, set it up so that the removal of an electron will cause the second electron in the first system to have an opposite status, remove an electron from the first system, and Viola the second electron in the the second system will have the same observable (no dead cat) spin as the removed electron, instantaneously, FTL. This has indeed been achieved in a laboratory system, about a year ago. Anyways, hope this clears things up (befuddles you more?).

Jane, you ignorant dorkhead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, at least I can you's a question mark.

Distributed Stir-frying!

[Anonymous Coward]

and super-duper parallel Beowulf chili cookout!

It's so hard to keep track of these things.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the power glove. It's so bad.

Silly people need to learn their units of measure

[Anonymous Coward]

They started doing that when they realized that if a MB=10^6, they can put bigger numbers on the box than if a MB=2^20 ;)

Ahem (Surely I'm not the first to notice this?)

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, emphasis mine:

You don't know whether any information is being transmitted when you look at the [chaotic] wave form, so it could offer enhanced privacy," Roy says. From a commercial standpoint, this could provide a secure way to send credit card information over the Internet, notes Ken Carter, associate director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a research institute affiliated with Columbia University.

Associate Director == Janitor, maybe?

I say nothing about the research, because the article gives no information about it. Technical reporting this is not.

Great typo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Urr.. welcome to the Nerd world. We've been using terms like this for a /long/ time. HTH.

uhm.. wander how they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

possible I guess, but in your example you say you can generate 8 bits by selecting a contstant and then encoding based upon which lobes are orbited...makes sense, but I doubt very very much that a constant can be encoded in less than 8 bits....more like a floating point number...so you get 32 bits in and 8 bits out...or worse!

Chaotic signals

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, would you mind giving more elaborate explanations ? As is usual for such a news article, the paper we're commenting on has almost no contents.

Everything to make a newshead wet his undies, sure. Such as `chaos, fractals, and everything', or that highlight about `live human neurons and chaotic OS'. Like duh, how dumb can you get ? Worse than Jon Katz :)

Heck, NO real information.

Serious papers and theorems appreciated... like, how does `chaos' apply to information theory, in your framework ?

natural 4 me, or natural 4 u ; )

[Anonymous Coward]

Sagan postulated in Contact, that the signal would be so un-natural as to not be missed.

What is natural? And Would they subscribe to our definition?

SETI is a long shot at best.

Data transmisstion

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure the noise is more of a factor, but increasing the data set to something above binary is going to esentially compress the data being transfered. I dunno about any of this chaos stuff, but analog computers able to computer within an infinite dataset between one and zero will be many magnitudes of order faster than current computers stuck with the chore of breaking the data down into binary and later putting it back together.

Netwok

[Brian Feldman]

I don't know about you, but I don't want Joe Random Luser using my wok! It's not open source, damnit!

gram-bits

[Altus]

Perhaps gram-bits refer to a tasty new gramcraker snack from those little elves at kebler

mmmmmmmmmm gram-licious

OK?

[alany]

Does this just sound like conventional data spreading to anyone else? Seems like they are scrambling the data stream with a pseudo-random sequence. What is new about that, lots of modem protocols use it?

I gather they have some other protocol development to improve the data throughput?

More info please, that article is lacking any real information.

Specious

[alany]

Depends upon how non-linear the lasing system is. At low amplitudes near the lasing threshold any laser will act randomly as far as spatial and temporal coherance goes.

Intresting field of study actually, you can see quantum effects in the macroscopic output of the laser. Although it could be argued that a sparking fluro light or dripping tap demonstrates exactly the same thing.

degree-so what.

[alany]

I have a degree?

Well I am a Electrical Engineering student, and a Computer Science student, but I have not graduated yet.

If you are looking at the vk2zay, that is my HAM call. I know a fair bit about lasers, I experiment with them a bit at home.

It was just a comment, jeeze... Sounds like envy.

Silly people need to learn their units of measure

[Fastolfe]

It sucks that people don't know their base units. What sucks even more is that the media makes it almost impossible. I've seen "mega-bits" written as "mb, MB, Mb" and "mega-bytes" written as "mb, MB and Mb".

From the metric system:

• M = mega (in computers, 1024*1024)
• G = giga (in computers, 1024*1024*1024)
• T = tera (in computers, 1024*1024*1024*1024)
• k = kilo (in computers, 1024)
• K = kelvins (unit of temperature)
• m = milli
• g = gram
• B = bytes, b = bits (computer units)

This makes for some useful and rather silly units of measure, depending on the letters you use and their case:

• kB = Kilobyte (correct!)
• MB = Megabyte
• mB = Millibyte (not a real measurement)
• Mb = Megabit (correct, not to be confused with MB)
• mb = Millibit (not a real measurement)
• KB = Kelvin-Byte (not a real measurement.. temperature/data-rate??)
• gb = Gram-Bits (not a real measurement.. mass/data rate??)

So the next time someone says, "I have a 50K file for you," your next exclamation needs to be, "Wow, that's cold!"

125 Mbits/sec? And?

[ChrisRijk]

Am I missing something? Else what's the big deal of 128Mbs? If it was 128Gbs, then that would be cool... though I thought the world record, in the lab, for a single bit of fibre was well over 1Tbit/s.

Or does he mean he's improved the efficiency? 100Mb ethernet runs at 200Mhz - it uses 2state changes to indicate 1 bit for reasons of reliability. (can't remember the technical term for this...)

Specious

[Q*bert]

I think these guys are bluffing. How the Hell do you get chaotic information from a laser, one of the finest examples of coherence and organization in the physical world? Their off-the-wall speculation about using neurons in computers, and their wild extrapolation to the possibility of talking to your computer in natural language, shows the sloppiness of their thinking and the cavalier flashiness of their press presentation.

(For what it's worth, I know what I'm talking about. I have a degree in cognitive science, and I'm going on in grad school in complex systems.)

Engineering vs Science

[slew]

Sorry, but the engineer in me hates to see science being confused with engineering solutions.

OLD-ethernet: Manchester encoding (one transition per bit) 1-2 bit encoding
NEW-"ethernet"-(100baseT,etc): 4-5 bit encoding

The number of transitions you need to encode per bit only has to do with clock recovery and jitter.

With the ME2:1 scheme there is a clock with every bit. With the 4-5 scheme the 5 bit symbols are
chosen to have the fewest concecutive same symbols. So you may not have a clock with each
bit, but you interpolate time to get the clock you need. More sensitive to jitter, but higher bit
density.

You can take this ad-infinitum and get RLL (run-length-limited). You can even just guess the
patterns before they stabilize like PRML (partial response, maximum likelyhood). This has all been
done with the hard disk in your computer.

Although this kind of stuff started out as science, it is so old, that now it is considered
applied science or engineering.

If chaos modulation is really new science, it should rely on new scientific principles that
are different from stuff that's been working for the last 10 years. This article is unclear on
this point.

Already Done It

[manitee]

old news. by compiling mod_chaos into apache 1.3.x, I have been able to access the Hubble telescope command set (via secure port IRDA access) and snap some wonderful shots of the microsoft executive female restroom.

Sensationalist Reporting

[Grue]

Is it me, or was the article full of errors? Fractals, from what I recall, are NOT the same as chaos theory. There are relations there, such as the iterative nature of both, but there is a distinct difference. Second, what does this have to do with machines having a conscious? Just because neurons are used for computation, does not mean the machine is instantly self-aware.

Usually I don't whine, but they're just spreading fear. "Oooooo, it's using biological components, watch out!!" And then the public starts getting pissed, and research dries up.

Netwok

[cpt kangarooski]

That's good, i like that. I had just thought it was a bit of chaos right there in the headline to get the point through.

uhm.. wander how they do it?

[Jim McCoy]

The sad thing is most of the people who populate slashdot are too new to the net (i.e. "ARPAnet? whazzat...more OSS dude") to understand the pun :(

It doesn't work that way.

[Jim McCoy]

Think of how this works as a big quantum one-time pad cryptosystem. You can actually transmit the message at FTL speeds, but you cannot decrypt the message until you get a copy of the key pad. The key pad is restricted to travelling no faster than the speed of light. The end result is that the data does move FTL but you can't decode it until the key arrives. [No this is not quite how it works, but is a good enough explanation on why this little trick will never provide the FTL communication system everyone thinks it should be able to provide.]

SETI sideline

[Skip666Kent]

I don't understand this stuff at all, so I'll keep it short. SETI's search for extraterrestrial signals has been disappointing thus far. Could they be searching for the wrong type of signal?

How, if possible, would one detect distant communications signals based on an advanced form of the chaotic system described in the article?

-kent

But did you know...

[unitron]

But did you know that Giga is pronounced "jiga"?
(from same root as gigantic)

Receiver laser?

[unitron]

Do lasers work backwards as photo-detectors the way light-emitting diodes are supposed to do?
Or is it a lasar (light amplification by stimulated absorption of radiation)?

The only requirements (a twofor)

[unitron]

"Ditto says the only requirements for building a chaotic operating system are two irregular or unpredictable elements."

A human user and a computer

"Ditto says the only requirements for building a chaotic operating system are two irregular or unpredictable elements."

Microsoft's secret formula!

Silly people need to learn their units of measure

[beb]

What makes it even more difficult is that even those units you list above are used in different ways depending on what technology they are used to measure:

Mb = Megabit, but this can mean either 1,048,576 bits (2^20) or 1,000,000 (10^6). How fsck'ing annoying! In networking 1 Mb *usually* means 10^6, but for memory it means 2^20.

It seems like most hard drive companies now list their drives where 1MB (Megabyte) equals 1,000,000 bytes! Those sneaky bastards!! Anyone know when they started doing this? I swear I recall having some old Seagate drives on which 1MB equaled 1,048,576 bytes...

-beb

hmmm what's next the Miller theory

[rtfm]

shrimp.... plate of shrimp
It's the Cosmic Unconsciousness
find one in every car You'll see

Not who you think

[chaotic]

Since I never use usenet, I can't be who you think. In fact, I'm so inept at computer wienner stuff that I have trouble with the slashdot login and must often post as anon. coward.

I am, however, familiar with chaos theory and have published a several papers on it's application to real problems. I'm a big fan of Prof. Roy's (& Ditto), the INLS at UCSD, Lou Pecora at NRL, and Harry Swinney at UT. I've seen alot of dumb stuff on chaos go by (Yuri Kratsov for one), but the Ga. Tech research is real, useful, and will come to fruition.

Hi Matt, Two

[chaotic]

I have an excuse for cruising slashdot, I'm a classically trained engineer. But, what's a real physicist of repute doing on a propellor head site like slashdot? Since you've departed your Eiffel phase, I thought you might be cured.

So, if these computer wiennies are such experts, how come not one of them was in sunny, warm, dry LaJolla earlier this week? Always a pleasure to hear Lou. But, that cryto guy -- is the hostile she a diffeomorphism? That is, is he implying all hostiles are shes or that all shes are hostiles. It wasn't clear.

How embarrassing

[chaotic]

At high power levels lasers are not coherent. In fact, the failure mode is a classic descent into chaos.

Were you a student of mine, you'd flunk. For all the research you did to check this out, have you considered a career in hamburger flipping?

Sites to check, for the interested

[chaotic]

Despite the ignorant tone of most of the comments here in dorkland, there is important research being done on the application of chaos theory to real problems:

Institute for Nonlinear Science (UCSD)
http://www.zweb.com/apnonlin/

NRL
http://code6343.nrl.navy.mil/
http://chaos-mac.nrl.navy.mil/

and the Ga. Tech sites
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/chaos/

sounds good but...

[magister]

Rajarshi Roy, professor of physics at Georgia Tech, reports that he has sent data at 125 megabits per second - more than double what's possible with binary protocols - by using what he has labeled "chaos communications.


Ok, whell thats good and all, but maby he has never herd of OC-3(155Mbs) or OC-12(622Mbs) witch are some of the most common forms for the internet back bone. Also what about 1000Base-BX and the soon to come 1000Base-Tx witch should work over standard Cat5 twisted pair.


while chaos computing sounds good to me, i think it has more to do with the Hardware and OS, then protocals are second nature :)

uhm.. wander how they do it?

[MAXOMENOS]

In theory it's pretty simple...if you had a system with two strange attractors you could generate a sequence of eight bits just by plugging the right constant in the right place. Each time it goes around strange attractor A, that's a zero; each time it goes around strange attractor B, that's a one. Lorenz's equasions for modeling the weather could do it pretty simply.

You could double your output with a more complicated five-variable system with four strange attractors; but it's not very far scalable after that.

The geek who thought up this scheme is Rajarshi Roy, chair of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. You'll be seeing more chaotic computing coming out in the near future.

Umm, this *isn't* news...

[deeny]

What do you think Benoit Mandelbrot was working on when he *named* fractals? That's right...network transmission failures. ::sigh::

_Deirdre

What the NetWok?

[Axe]

Is it related to Ewoks?

Hmmm...

[HappyHead]

I thought the bit at the end about the other guy planning to use live neurons in a computer was neat, it could lead to some great tech support calls...
CALLER: My computer won't let me change my password, and it keeps asking where the dog went - we don't have a dog! What's wrong?
ANSWER: I'm sorry sir, your computer has Alzheimer's.
Opens up a whole new field of computer psychology, professional PC therapists making sure you've got a well-adjusted machine. :)

uhm.. wander how they do it?

[F2F]

Probably they have a butterfly router :)

Other info

[BonzoDog]

There's a press release from GA Tech with more info here and on this page there's a paper (PDF or PS) on it.

Go, wramblin' wreck...

It's written by CNN. What do you expect?

[BonzoDog]

25Mbps over a fiber isn't such a big deal

No, it's not.

The maximum speed using electronic technology is OC192 (2.48Gbps), after that you must switch to purely optical technology

This is purely optical technology. The article at GA Tech says there's no theoretical limit to the bandwidth, so who knows? Maybe it could be used for > OC192.

Data transmisstion

[Christopher Thomas]

I've taken a look at the article, and this just appears to be a fancy way of modulating data on to the laser beam carrier. The fundamental limits remain the same as with other methods of transmission. That they see a bandwidth increase is not a surprise, because they are using an analog waveform to carry the data instead of a digital pulse train. The down side to this is greater suceptiblity to noise.

The fundamental maximum bandwidth of a fiber optic line using visible light at sane power levels is on the order of 10^14-10^15 bits per second, roughly corresponding to the frequency of oscillation of a light wave at visible wavelengths. By using analog data encoding you might be able to bump this up to 10^16 or higher, but you'd pay dearly for it in terms of power consumption (as your beam needs to be brighter if you want to have more intensity levels available). You can similarly improve noise rejection by using a brighter beam.

For those of you with time on your hands, the maximum sampling rate that you can meaningfully use is the frequency of the photons being transmitted (C / wavelength), the error in the measurement of the number of photons received is roughly the square root of the number of photons, and the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency, and is single-digit eV for visible light.

And I seem to recall hearing about terabit fiber being demonstrated a while back.

what is the difference between a bit and a byte

[Christopher Thomas]

A bit is a binary digit, 0 or 1. A byte is (usually) a collection of 8 bits, representing an integer from 0..255 (unsigned) or -128..127 (signed). As it takes 8 bits to store one byte, there is a substantial difference in capacity between bits-per-second and bytes-per-second.

And as Ur_vile pointed out, some machines use bytes that are not 8 bits in length. However, you aren't likely to encounter them outside of computer research labs [note the "likely" before flaming me, please].

125 Mbps (that's 125 megaBITS per second)

[Cheeze]

if you actually READ the article, it clearly says "he has sent data at 125 megabits per second." this is not really too fast compared with what was actually posted (less by a factor of 8).

read, then do math, THEN reply

[jabber]

So you said what? 125MB * 8 = 1GB?? Your point?

The whole article is full of BS. It's a clear case of a geek grad-student with no life except for his research, talking to an air-head CNN reporter who has about as much common sense as fractals have in common with chaos theory.

A 125MB datarate is a 1Gbit datarate. Gigabit Ethernet has been on fiber for some time now. Firewire is promising to bump it from the top-dog spot. A 1Gb datarate in fiber is nothing new.

On another note, they may be applying chaos theory to soliton handling - but it doesn't say anything like that in the article.

Reread the first paragraph folks, it'll tell you exactly how it got into CNN.

SETI sideline

[jabber]

Could they be searching for the wrong signal? Sure, or they could be looking in the wrong place, which is more likely.

Sagan postulated in Contact, that the signal would be so un-natural as to not be missed. A sequence of prime numbers fits the bill. Now, I recall something about the frequency being related to the natural frequency of hydrogen, and I don't quite understand that. There's plenty of hydrogen out there, all lit up and transmitting - so why blend in?

I'd say that if the signal pattern is to be unique, so should the frequency/wavelength. Maybe we're just not able to detect un-natural frequencies yet? Or, maybe they just don't want to talk to us. :) Why would they want to talk to someone who can't listen to their (pi/e)GHz signal?

degree-so what.

[Cassandra]

State you background and experience. Just because you have a degree doesn't mean you know anything.

Why not ignore both degree and background/experience,
and look at the content of the message instead?

On /. I treat all messages the same way -- I doubt them ;)

Great typo!

[Cassandra]

Automagically? What a great term!

Yeah, isn't it! But hardly a new one. It's been in everyday use, at least at my University, for many years now. I suspect it's not long until it makes it as a dictionary entry:

Automagic When something occurs
automatically, as if by magic.

:-)

Windows based on Chaos Theory

[Dr.Claw]

In recent news today industry leaders were baffled when they realized that the engineers at microsoft were actually developing something. They were developing the most chaotic OS known to man. One MS employee was quoted as saying "Yes, WINDOWS 2K (TM) will be based on such advanced chaos theory that trying to comprehend it will render you insane. So, my advice would be to just sit back and let it do what it does. This is based on years of advanced research, we have found that often people would rather not be working, or maybe they are losing -40 to 50 at quake, so in theory the machine would lock up or 'blue screen' at this point. With the chaotic fators involved, Windows 2K (TM) will be able to calculate just when to crash so as to make your life easier!"

Anyone still read old news? Theory how its done =)

[twinkie]

If anyone reads this, I'll be happy =)
Anyway, from what I can find and read about the subject, commincations won't be faster because its chaotic; it will be faster because it's optic however. The value is that 1, data won't be encoded digitally, pulses, frequencies, or what not, so more data can be sent on the same signal; Phone lines for example are not digital, but analogue, and in that sense 'more' data is sent over them than can be done digitally; Think how much bandwidth it would take to send voice over a 33.6 phone line, since that is done in analogue, but nigh impossible in digital, without significant ammounts of compression and such.

Anyway, point 2, since chaotic communication isn't faster, its potentially more reliable and more secure. Anyone familiar with PGP? That may be a good example; if the two lasers could be kept in sync, or in a similar state, it then would be like continually applying a PGP encryption on the data stream; that and the fact that the PGP private and public keys change continuously because the lasers are chaotic, and not static, and are synced as well, so not only are they secure, but unpredictable. Another benefit is that applying a chaotic encryption automatically allows for the analogue transmission I mentioned earlier, so in that sense a chaotic transmission is faster.

For those arguments for noise and such, redundant and corrective data can always be sent across the wire, right? I mean, network packets are lost and retransmitted all the time now, on the internet!
-Twink

Netwok

[zod]

Oh man, that cracked me up.
I guess I shouldn't read /. at 3am