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蚂蚁与TCP

作者:易隐者 发布于:2012-8-29 8:59 Wednesday 分类:其 他

       今天在上看到一帖,很有意思,说是斯坦福大学的研究者发现蚂蚁的行为跟TCP相关特性非常相像,其觅食行为跟TCP的拥塞避免、慢启动、超时机制等暗合,我们先一起来看一下原文吧。

【原文】:

链接:http://jandan.net/2012/08/27/ants-internet.html

人类能做到的一些超炫的事情,其实早就存在了!比如,蚂蚁觅食,就跟网络传送协议(TCP/Internet's Transmission Control Protocol)的方法基本差不多,蚂蚁们一直就这样收集着食物。假如先前的蚂蚁出去好久了都还没带食物回的话,它们就不再外派找吃的了;当初级数据包显示小带宽时,TCP就会节流数据传输。

蚂蚁们也使用TCP的慢启动技术,它们发出派出一小波觅食的蚂蚁,来计算出食物的相对数量(带宽),再调节派出蚂蚁的数目。相似的是,若网络链接超时,源头就会停止传送数据包;若过了20分钟蚂蚁们还没回来,外派停止。

这项发现的研究者之一 Balaji Prabhakar 说,假如蚂蚁的这个行为在网络之前就被发现的话,可能会影响网络的设计。这种觅食方式久经时间考验,可能有很多值得我们学习的地方。鬼知道呢,说不定此刻也还有其它的算法早就存在着,正默默地等着被发现。

【英文原文】:

链接:http://gizmodo.com/5937981/ants-have-been-using-internet-algorithms-for-millions-of-years

Mankind has been able to accomplish some pretty impressive things, but some of them were around long before we figured them out. Ants, for instance, hunt for food in a way that's basically the same as the Internet's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and they were doing it long before the Internet was around.

It all has to do with how harvester ants gather their food. The same way that TCP will throttle data transmission if initial packets indicate little bandwidth, harvester ants will send less foragers out for food if the initial ones take too long to come back with grub.

From Stanford News:

[The] rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

And that's not where the similarities end either. Ants also use TCP's slow start technique, by sending out a wave of foragers (packets) to figure out the relative amount of food (bandwidth) before scaling their numbers up or down. Likewise, the same way a connection will time out if the source stops sending packets, the ants will stop sending out new foragers if none return for 20 minutes.

Balaji Prabhakar, one of the researchers behind the discovery, says that if this behavior had been uncovered pre-Internet, it might have influenced its design. Even so, this foraging process has been seriously time-tested, and there still might be things we can learn from it. In the meantime, who knows what other algorithms might already be out there, quietly waiting to be discovered.

      我顺便把斯坦福大学的研究报道找出来了,链接如下:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/ants-mimic-internet-082312.html

斯坦福研究者发现“蚂蚁网”-Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.

Katherine Decktar Harvester ant foragers waiting inside the nest

Harvester ant foragers waiting inside the nest.

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn't see any overlap between his and Gordon's work, but inspiration would soon strike.

"The next day it occurred to me, 'Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'" Prabhakar said. "The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol."

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.

This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

L.A. CiceroDeborah Gordon

Biologist Deborah Gordon has been studying ants for more than 20 years.

It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon's experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon's experiments.

"Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years," Prabhakar said.

They also found that the ants followed two other phases of TCP. One phase is known as slow start, which describes how a source sends out a large wave of packets at the beginning of a transmission to gauge bandwidth; similarly, when the harvester ants begin foraging, they send out foragers to scope out food availability before scaling up or down the rate of outgoing foragers.

Another protocol, called time-out, occurs when a data transfer link breaks or is disrupted, and the source stops sending packets. Similarly, when foragers are prevented from returning to the nest for more than 20 minutes, no more foragers leave the nest.

Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.

Gordon thinks that scientists have just scratched the surface for how ant colony behavior could help us in the design of networked systems.

There are 11,000 species of ants, living in every habitat and dealing with every type of ecological problem, Gordon said. "Ants have evolved ways of doing things that we haven't thought up, but could apply in computer systems. Computationally speaking, each ant has limited capabilities, but the collective can perform complex tasks.

"So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed and scalable – the very qualities that we need in large engineered distributed systems," she said. "I think as we start understanding more about how species of ants regulate their behavior, we'll find many more useful applications for network algorithms."

The work is published in the Aug. 23 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

       看完这些,你或许会说:“难怪你的这个个人博客叫蚂蚁网。”,我想我又找到了一个取名为“蚂蚁网”的强有力的佐证,但当时取名“蚂蚁网”的时候,我并不知道这个研究成果,我的初衷等哪天得闲想写的时候,我会将其写到《关于》里面。

       大自然总会有很多难以解释清楚的暗合现象,以前我们怎能想到蚂蚁的行为跟TCP的工作机制有关联呢?我又怎能想到我将我的博客取名为“蚂蚁网”后不足半年的时间,竟然因这个研究让其名字跟博客的主要内容关联起来了呢?

       冥冥之中,总有很对东西是难以用理性理解和解释的,而我则相信这些都是注定了的。

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标签: TCP 蚂蚁 蚂蚁网

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