Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello. Hey, should we start? Let's do it. Okay. All right. So today we're going to start with a guy, a very sweet, very tall guy named Sunil Nakrani. Yeah. Hi, I'm Sunil Nakrani. Where did you grow up? And were you just a computer kid? Like you just love computers? Or how did that, how did this all start? So you want to start from there? Yeah. I mean, a little bit.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Sunil Nakrani face with the internet in the early 2000s?
Yeah, so I was actually born in Kenya. But he grew up between India and the UK. Right. He studies hard. Bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering. And in 1989, he lands a job at IBM. just as the world is encountering this new thing called the internet.
Welcome. What about this internet thing? Do you know anything about that? There's loads of useful information in here. You can get news, recipes.
So, Danil is like, okay, why not go and study communication engineering? He goes to Oxford to get his PhD, and one day, near the beginning of the semester, while he is on one of the desktop computers in the computer lab, his whole department, including him, gets an email from one of his professors, who's an American guy. And the email just says, Hey guys, America is under attack.
Come down to the common room and then watch, right?
It came out of the clear blue sky on a mild fall morning in Manhattan.
Oh, it's 2001. Yes, 2001. Sunil's standing there in horror. And, I mean, he has a million questions. Like, who did this? Why? Is America at war? So he goes online.
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Chapter 3: How did Sunil's background influence his perspective on technology?
To get any sort of new information. But he just... Can't. A lot of the websites were just not responding. Some websites had just crashed. Others would like just keep loading, but then never fully load. There's one point there, you know, it was such overwhelming demand for, you know, news that they resorted to serving only text. Plain text.
Because there were so many people trying to get to those websites.
Because there was just so many people trying to get access.
So much hunger of people trying to figure out, like, what the hell is going on here? Correct. And he's like, why is it that at the very moment when I in the world want to access something the most, that's when I can't access it? And this used to happen all the time. As millions of people flooded the system.
Last week a picture of a dress was posted on Tumblr.
Some website. Healthcare.gov. Or picture.
Or video.
Suddenly become popular. And you get this crash of people. This flash flood. And it breaks the internet. And this situation. A demand that is beyond what they planned for. Sunil became kind of obsessed with it. And so I ended up looking at websites, how they architect some of these infrastructures. And he's like, there's got to be a way to fix this. Yeah.
Like, what can I apply to solve that problem? Meanwhile, Sunil's wife is working in Atlanta. We were doing back and forth between Oxford and Atlanta. And at a certain point, he's having kind of a hard time with this internet problem. Because how do you design a system for the future when you don't know what the future is? And one day, he just thinks to himself, Georgia Tech is down the street.
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Chapter 4: What pivotal event sparked Sunil's quest to understand internet failures?
Looking to, you know, discuss some ideas. Can I come and see you? And that was basically it. I didn't describe the problem in my email. I didn't really expect anything substantial. Within 30 minutes, he gets a response from a guy named Craig Tovey. Saying, come by my office. And then a very tall guy knocks on my door. And it says, you know, I'm looking for Craig. This, of course, is Craig Tovey.
Hi. Good to meet you. Craig's a systems engineer. Operations research. His job is to make huge operations run smoothly. Factories, shipping routes, that kind of thing. So anyway, I... Walked into his office, we sat down, we started talking, and I started describing the problem. So Sunil is like, look, I'm trying to fix the internet.
I'm trying to stop it from breaking every time one of these internet flash floods happen. He didn't say a lot, actually, at the beginning. He just kept listening. And then 25, 30 minutes later, you know, suddenly Craig Tovey said, oh, oh, oh, wait. Craig stands up. And then went back to his desk and pulled out a paper. And he plops it down in front of Sunil.
It is called The Pattern and Effectiveness of Forager Allocation Among Flower Patches by Honeybee Colonies. So at the time, I thought, oh, why are we talking about honeybees?
Yeah, why are we talking about honeybees?
Well, Craig had this hunch that bees had something to teach Sunil and all of us, really. Because it turns out bees are sort of a model of how to thrive in an uncertain world.
Hmm. Okay.
Okay.
So that's the story I want to talk about today. The story of how a multi-billion dollar tech industry used a trick they learned from millions of years of honeybee evolution to build the internet as we know it. Okay. Giddy up. Okay, so Craig and his bee study, it really began with his collaborator.
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Chapter 5: How did Sunil connect honeybees to solving internet issues?
And at first, Craig thought this would be pretty straightforward. I thought that biologists had figured out everything. But turns out they hadn't. That's right.
If somebody asked me how much we know about how a honeybee colony works, I'd say 50%.
And, you know, 50% is not nothing. They knew, for example, about the waggle dance, which you might have heard of.
Yes, I've heard that bees will waggle. And what is the waggle, though?
I mean, it's quite sophisticated. It's a dance that bees do to sort of show other bees where they just came from.
Oh, so it's like a it's a choreographed map. It's like a map dance.
It's like a map dance. And this is like a piece of the puzzle. Oh, yeah. Von Frisch won the Nobel Prize. But what the biologists had not figured out is the bigger picture.
What Tom would call the wisdom of the hive.
And that is what Tom was working on when Craig called him. And Tom said, well, you know, come help me run these experiments. And the two of them would end up doing an experiment together that would give us a little peek into that wisdom of the hive and would eventually become the paper that many years later, Craig would slap down in front of Sunil in his office. It's still vivid in my memory.
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Chapter 6: What is the Honeybee Algorithm and how was it developed?
Hey, go that way. And as all that's happening, every now and then, Hey, go this way. a bee comes in and dances for the ten-minute patch.
Hey, go this way. But there will be more bees going to that five-minute patch.
And there will be fewer bees going to the ten-minute patch. Just because of the bees coming back twice as often.
Hey, go that way. Oh, OK. So the closer flower patch gets more bees saying, go that way, that way, that way. And so more bees go that way instead of this way.
Right. So now here comes one of the beautiful parts of it. And this is where it gets really interesting. If there are a lot of bees going to this five minute patch. Eventually, Craig says, there will be more and more depleted flowers. This patch, it starts to run out of nectar. Go that way, go that way, go that way. That means that a honeybee, she's going to take longer to fill her stomach.
Hey, go that way.
Right. So a five-minute patch, if it's crowded, is no longer a five-minute patch. Go that way. Right. It might become a seven-minute patch. And as the patch gets more and more picked over. Now it's an eight-minute patch.
Hey, go that way.
And then. A ten-minute patch. And. Hey. At that point. Go this way. It's taking the bees the same amount of time. Go that way. to go to the close-by patch as it is to go to the one that's further away. Go this way. And because of the dancing, the hive is sort of evening out the number of bees it's sending to each patch. Go that way. Go this way. Go that way. Go this way.
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Chapter 7: How do honeybees make decisions about flower patches?
Some execution of some Java code or something. Let me see here. I think it's around here somewhere. And then push that content back to you via internet. Here you go. Where it pops up on my family's desktop computer back in 1999. And then you can enjoy it. Then the server just goes back to hanging out on the server farm. But then... Oh, another person wants to see that website.
All right, let me just go ahead and get that for you. There you go. All right, where was I? Man, I just love this country. Oh.
Oh.
And as it starts to go viral, until that one server is like, can no longer serve up this website in a timely manner. And this would happen all the time because back then, the way servers were allocated was like... you'd get how many servers you paid for. Right. Like the owner of the Hamster Dance website probably would have been like, hey, I'll just pay for the one server.
Because I don't expect my website to experience a lot of demand. And how wrong they were. Right. Do you remember what that was like, though? Yes, I do. Like how slow it was? The like slow loading and the like, ugh. If something took longer than five seconds, generally the human psychology was that people give up on the website. So as Sunil saw it, the problem was relatively simple.
There are a bunch of servers. And sometimes they can be not very busy. Sometimes they're just sitting around doing nothing. But other times... They could be overly busy. And so how, in a system that is changing so quickly, do you get those servers who are doing nothing to help those servers who are doing too much? start moving these servers around where they're needed.
And this is the problem that Sunil brought to Craig. Yeah, hi, I'm Sunil. And I mean, heck, within 20 seconds. I was part of the group. I saw that the problem was similar to the honeybee problem.
Like immediately? Like that fast?
Yeah, because to Craig, it was like he'd been holding on to this rusty old key that he was holding for more than a decade. And Sunil showed up with something that looked like it might be the exactly matching lock. Yeah, yeah. Evolution has solved this problem in some way, right? And now you're saying, okay, can he do it in the artificial domain? And so... They got to work. Right.
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Chapter 8: What parallels exist between honeybee behavior and internet server management?
So you're saying the opposite. You have made the internet so enjoyable that you have cost me days and hours, potentially even years of my life. So I should be mad at you.
Yeah.
And that's it. See you next week. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes... With help from... Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semayi. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.
Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the Science Friday team has been reporting high-quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies.
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