You put the virus in, You put the virus out ...

You put the virus in,
and shake it all about!

They do the Hokey Pokey and you turn your network off,
That's what it's all about...

I ran across this great xkcd.com comic and it reminded me a ton of the research Big Red and I did in college.


Great times. If you don't know, in college I worked with a couple guys on some fairly interesting, but ultimately futile undergraduate research projects. While it is a shame that none of them really went to far and we didn't end up making any sort of breakthrough, the experience was great. The whole thing forced me to think beyond the class room and search for unique and new ideas. I would recommend the experience to anyone.

Although Big Red's solo work which was a bit more fruitful, if I remember correctly, our combined work was in perched squarely at the crossroads of Genetic Algorithms Lane, Graph Theory Court, and Multi-Agent Systems Expressway. In a nut shell, we were researching ways of having small autonomous software agents (who could move themselves from one machine to another at their own discretion) traverse a network of computers in an attempt to combat virus threats.

If it sounds like we were secretly trying to take over the world ... Josh already had that idea ... and yes we were.

The xkcd comic above hit home b/c much of our work involved trying to track and map the spread of our fake viruses and understand how our agents were behaving against them. It would have been very interesting to try it from the other end and do research into how existing viruses spread and trying to develop methods of limiting their impact from that angle ... rather than randomly trying to find solutions to a problem we didn't fully understand and couldn't at the time simulate.

With a small bank of decent PCs, virtualization software, and some good modely/monitoring software in place it would be pretty sweet to see how fast the problems spread and see what changes could help combat it.

In case anyone might be interested, here (pdf) is a link to your first paper, and here (.doc) is a link to a random draft of our second paper which gmail was kind enough to archive for me :)