ANTS SOLVE THE UNSOLVEABLE  

During the last two decades British Telecom, aware of the necessity to modernize and improve phone service have reduced hardware used by 100 times while increasing network capacity one hundredfold. They still need a smarter way. Who are they going to call? Ants. That's right. Ants.

Why is it they wondered, that a disrupted phone network causes chaos for days, even weeks. In the U.S., eight major network failures occurred in between January and November 1991. These happened in six states and disrupted more than 27 million customers. In Florida it cut off the 911 emergency service number for three hours. What happened? The back-up, fail-safe software turned out to be a chimera, which contained the same bug as the original software parent. That does not make for a good image. AT&T lost customers to Sprint and MCI. British Telecom doesn't want that to happen to them. What to do?

They came to the rather rapid conclusion that ants handle such problems better than humans. A disrupted ant colony appears to have an amazing capacity to re-align itself and get back to the normal routine almost immediately. What do those ants know that we don't?

BT watched, they studied, and eventually came up with software that handled information in a manner reminiscent of the way ants handle food. Almost every moment of every day, ants are out collecting food. Just as a phone company must receive, collect, route and send electronic information. Ants use many different routes to get to the food source, and back to the food storage bins at the colony. Phone companies do the same thing, with communications.

With this image of a new system, Peter Cochrane, leader of the prevent-the-chaos software team with the advanced systems group at BT's Martlesham Research Laboratories near Ipswich, saw this analogy as the answer to the potential disaster the company was trying to avert. Put the initial stage of a "self-organizing network" into a personal computer. So there is no over-riding central command. The old system told a telephone exchange it was overloaded and to pass the load on to another exchange, that then also thinks it is overloaded, so it does the same thing. In seconds a network is in the telephonic equivalent of cardiac arrest.

The old system, built as a fail-safe was sure to fail because every switch thought alike. As well, with AT&T old systems handled billings, caller identification, 800 and 900 numbers and other services. A bug anywhere in the system could cause a crash. The new system allows each switch to think independantly first, "Am I really overloaded?" Each network element is managed by small software dictates, thus each unit has a virus immune injection that provides protection from faults occurring elsewhere in the system. Just as the ants do. The loss of an ant or two doesn't disrupt an ant colony. They all don't panic, because each ant is a selfcontained unit, operating on its own genetic program and capable of performing many different functions on its own.

Ant-mimicking software performs better than that modeled on humans. Is that telling us something? I'm so continually impressed with what my computer can do, that I would swear yesterday I sensed Ezmerelda (my Macintosh computer) was dreaming. BOX TO GO WITH BRITISH TELECOM ANTS STORY

A British Telecom company willing to go to the extreme of having ants help them with their problems, also isn't above going outside of Britain (however, it is the first time to a university) to get help on potential future problems.

BT computers have no problem recognizing numbers formed into spread sheets or letters formed into stories and reports, but tomorrow those same computers are going to have to recognize images. What to do?

BT is spending roughly $500,000 a year with the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on new ways in which computers can handle visual images. A computer can look at and recognize a date or a number. It can find a word or a sentence. Some can understand verbal commands, but couldn't recognize a barking dog. BT wants to change that. Think of a police lineup that always has trouble finding similar-looking suspects. Soon police officers will be able to pull those other line-up people out of a computer and match them with a suspect. Potential witnesses can watch them run by on a split screen to observe resemblances. A picture is worth a thousand words.

British Telecom plans to introduce a videophone in the near future. Working with the reknowned MIT Media Lab they may be able to move faster than by relying solely on their own specialized staff. Survival today depends on selling what the market wants, not what you have on the shelf. or in the system. Consumers can now go anywhere in the world to get the best.

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