Blog: Fruit Flies Could Hold Key to Future Internet

Fruit Flies Could Hold Key to Future Internet
Internet Evolution (03/23/11) Michael Kassner

Developing truly effective distributed computing algorithms for parallel processors is a major challenge for computer scientists. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers are researching this problem by studying fruit flies. Fruit flies are very good at solving Maximal Independent Set problems, which identify a subset of computers that connect to every other node in the network and provide structure, says CMU professor Ziv Bar-Joseph. Fruit flies solve similar problems naturally because during their brain development a process called Sensory Organ Precursor selection occurs. Since the flies can solve the problem without possibly knowing how many neighbors each network node has, determining how they achieve this could lead to robust and efficient computational methods, Bar-Joseph says. Sensor networks also could benefit from the new algorithm, according to Bar-Joseph. He says that "our fruit fly-derived algorithm is more efficient than any known method," and could become the method of choice for sensor-network applications.

View Full Article