Self-Assembling Networks

prostoalex writes "Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks. By emulating the behavior of ants and insects the team, which is led by Frank Schweitzer, demonstrated a simulation where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages. Schweitzer's research papers are available off his personal Web site. The scientific paper referred in the original article, Self-Assembling of Networks in an Agent-Based Model is available off Cornell server."

We already have one of those.

My network team looks *just* like a swarm of ants when the network goes down.

Enormous Benifit

Imagine if you will being able to create and configure a LAN using technology like this? How long till we see it in Linux.

Setting -> autolan configure -> select yes -> give network a name -> done!

Suddenly the expression...

"this network looks like a bunch of spiders having an orgy" has new meaning...

Self-assembling intelligence next?

Taking this idea one step further, what if each computer node on the network was given a basic set of rules so that it emulated a bunch of brain cells. Would the network self-organise to create some sort of intelligence?

Re:Self-assembling intelligence next?

It turns out that already today all successful applications of socalled "artificial intelligence" are self assembling.

In the first approaches to artificial intelligence [mq.edu.au] people used programming languages to obtain systems that generate intelligent or at least apparently intelligent behavior.

All newer [utexas.edu] approaches to artificial intelligence start with a large number of very simple units that, learning from data from the real world, develop specific patterns of connections. Many models even develop their own structure in such a way.

From my perspective is intelligence as well as artificial intelligence only possible in a system that can self-structure.

They didn't react to this one very quickly /.'d

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Shit

My girlfriend was going to study Networks Cabling and Construction (wires , switches ...). It will be funny to say her she will be messed with ants and spiders ... I think you will hear her scream from USA :D

I wonder

i have nothing informative to say.. but hell, i think this is really great software-engineering development.

centralized? self asembly?

For now I stick to OSPF. And it is not centralized also. And so are BGP, RIP an ISIS.

Maybe we should use the borg icon for this one...

"We are your network...ect..ect...we will adapt"

this isn't news

Last Update: 18 March 1999
The article was posted to his web site in 1999 and this is front-page stuff? And the article itself was published in 1997. Stop the presses!

Too bad for me..

Now it seems that my time in college is wasted. No need for network admins.

I can see it now!

HUB, "MALFORMED PACKET!!!! AHHH!!!! - HELP HELP HELP! I am lost!"

Router "Calm down, this is nothing compared to the broadcast storm of 93. Everything will be alright."

HUB, "Thank you,"

Router "These simpletons, when will they ever learn just to ignore that packet."

ala - bugs life.

Ant-like-technology

"By emulating the behavior of ants and insects..."

(I wonder who played the Queen...)

I didn't know ants were this advanced! This must be the final proof that indeed insects are super-intelligent aliens come to earth to eat our... ehm... sugar-water... If only we can harness this power elsewhere! Maybe we should try milipede power-plants next... All that static electricity from all those legs must be harnessed!

It's about time.

Wasn't Skynet [imdb.com] supposed to be self-aware like 5 years ago?

I mean, it's 2003, and we don't even have systems that we can't leave alone over the weekend. Where's the AI that's supposed to do all of the thinking for us, so we can actually get some free time? [Okay, there's that little problem with it trying to kill off all humans, but well, I'm sure they'll fix that in release 2]

*waves*

...and then all the system administrators disappear.. But then again, most sysadmins arnt even around their networks. instead they are answering calls from room 0139 because her computer can't boot up.

With your connections combined...

I am Captain Network!

*theme song*

Captain Network,
He's our hero,
gonna cut packet loss
down to zero!

Prey

Anyone read Michael Crichton's new book, Prey? This kind of thing is a little scary after reading that one!

Actual info?

This article is beyond ridiculous. It is more like a pointless press release from Dr. Seuss than actual info.

A node does this, then it does that, that somehow attracts other nodes doing something else, and POOF, the world is a great place to live in once again...

Give me a break. I'd rather read about magic, self-healing, server pixie-dust.

On a similar note, look for Dr. Seuss' latest book in stores soon: "One Node, Two Node, Red Node, Blue Node"

Potential

This could be really cool for ad-hoc wireless networks.

these guys don't watch enough anime

Anyone who does knows this is just a step before the evil computer AI infecting all of the other computers in the world and setting about to destroy mankind. I will rise up to defeat this terrible menace right after I find a girl with blue hair and eyes the size of dinner plates.

Web Service Intermediaries...

A lot of the web service intermediaries have these kind of capabilities...
You plug in their agents on the network and they slowly become aware of each other through message exchange. When one section of the network goes down the agents talk to each other to figure out which agent can be used to relay a message around the broken link.

It's really wierd to be up in layer 7 and see the same modeling of behavior of lower layers in the stack...

That's not how ants would do it

If it was real ants there'd be none of this "You have the blue nodes and we'll have the red nodes" niceness.

The blue ants would be killing the red ants and vice versa - and the scent given off by the dying ants would attract more ants to the area until there was one hell of a war going on for territory (nodes). With the winners getting better connectivity for their network. And the ants would quickly specialise into scouts, soldiers and queens (to reinforce the army).

Come to think of it, that'd be much more interesting than plain old networking anyway :)

All this cuteness and collaboration all the time - do people not realise that the Mother in Mother Nature isn't mother as in 'caring nurturing type person' - it's mother as in M.O.A.B. :)

Coded

I've help test, write and measure the success of code that does exactly this. Our implementation uses the ants to collect routing latencies and update routing tables. It's actually surprisingly efficient and deals very well with downed nodes depending on your timeouts for downed nodes, etc.

Big Deal

Been there. [newscientist.com] Done that. [ulb.ac.be] These types of algorithms are not exactly new, and what this paper describes is no more "self-assembling" than any other distributed routing/discovery protocol - examples of which have existed for over twenty years. Of course, lots of things are new to the Slashdot editors that are old to the rest of us.

Alright, where's the cleanup robot swarms?

The somewhat self-assembling nature of P2P networks got me thinking about little swarms of tiny clean up robots. Instead of a hunanoid robot, it seems what would be more useful and simpler for things like household or even commercial maintenanc is a network of small robots relying on each other for various specialized functions sort of like cells in a larger organism.
It seems like you almost have to forego the android approach and go this way to get automated maintenance workers financially feasible because there will be certain parts that will tend to wear out much faster than others. It's the nature of the clean up game that many of the parts are consumeables.
While my musings on P2P were rather far from the goal, this sounds quite a bit closer. I know some fugly buildings in a town not far from here that could really use a good scrub down.

DNS

People have been tlaking for years about how kludged together the current internet infrastructure is; my question is, might something like this make for a feasable replacement, or at least a suppliment to what is already out there? I can see this being very useful indeed. You'd be able to de-centralize the root servers, and have them be distributed from

Rendezvous

I don't know a lot about the state-of-the-art in the area of network discovery/repair other than what I know as a socket-programmer and sysadmin, but I'm wondering if someone who does know can point out the differences between, say, this research and Apple's Rendezvous [apple.com] (not to be confused with Tibco's product by the same name [tibco.com])?

It seems to me that the basic goals are similar, but with Apple focusing more on the engineering side of solving a user-problem rather than passing the point of diminishing returns on "correct" solutions. Please, feel free to enlighten me though. This stuff is actually really promising, and I hope to live in a world 5 years from now where my laptop just "fits in" to the network that it's placed on in more ways than mere DHCP can accomodate.

Thanks!

Humboldt University, eh?

Why am I not surprised that the people in Humboldt found a way for themselves to do less work?

I wonder if we'll see a press release from them later saying they've designed something to emulate a particularly famous local plant. ;-)

Self-Assembly gone wrong

IT Guy: We're being nailed off our ABC uplink with a denial of service attack!
Manager: Well, we still have our DEF uplink in reserve. Drop everything from ABC!
IT Guy: Okay, much better now.... oh wait, the network reassembled to attack our DEF link!
Manager: I think I'll be cavorting in Arizona for a while...

Are there any agents?

where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network...

Good god, didn't you people learn anything from The Matrix?! Agent-based architecture is the most dangerous type of computer system you can design!

SPAM requires this repair

I'm of the opinion that spammers represent an infection of the net and that we are watching how the network is adapting to fight it off.

I guess

Sun was right. Now, the network really is the computer.

A good research work

The paper is indeed very interesting and innovative, but keep in mind that it is very far from being suitable to embed into your next 802.11 adapter.

While this approach is indeed appealing, it has still some drawbacks, e.g:
- generally, you can't tell what your topoligy your network will end up having, so forget about architecting one
- it does not guarantee that all your nodes will end up being networked within a fixed number of attempts (see the fig. 3 in the paper)
- it tends to require significant redundancy of interchangeable nodes to function well

Such approach can work well, say, for military field communications, but would be clearly suboptimal for building a corporate network.

And of course, as most of agent research, this is still too far from established technology ready for production.

Where are the 'pheremones'?

Perhaps I'm not understanding something, but how do the researchers intend on having the nodes in a real life network emit 'pheremones'? The only application I can see for that is self organizing wireless hubs. But for hard wired networks it does not seem to make sense, since there is no way to estimate the ease of connecting two points based on distance alone.

Overall, this article only seems to apply to wireless networks. An interesting, but limited, usage.

You should also note that...

Andrew Harvey wrote basically the same exact article about ten years ago. The only difference was that he attempted to relate this concept to spirituality. The guy who wrote this article, Frank Schweitzer, has been accused in the past of taking ideas from other Conihilimous (The study of self structuring autonomous networks) experts such as Andrew Harvey and the asian mathemetician Niyh B. Tihtzen. just my two cents

Is it just me...

or does this sound remarkably like something leading up to Michael Crichton's Prey?

Dangerous implications

Admin: WHO in God's name sprayed for bugs in the office??? You just killed half of the network!!!