
Submission + - Bees can optimize Internet bottlenecks (msn.com)
prostoalex writes: "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality: "On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance." Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page: "As a stand-in for the dance floor, Tovey and his colleagues used what they called an advertisement board, which sent messages to communicate the location of hot Web sites. When one server received a user request to help out at a specific site, an internal ad popped up on the board to attract other servers in the hosting center. As in the hive, ads for locations in demand and offering better income potential lasted longer. And the longer the ads aired, the more they increased the chance that other servers would be recruited to help power the site du jour. Tovey said revenue, page hits or other parameters measuring a site's popularity could all do nicely as online nectar substitutes.""