Classic software engineering and the mighty pigeon

A diligent member of my army of stringers, researchers, fact-checkers and miscellaneous hangers-on forwarded me a BBC article on a contest between South Africa's broadband carrier and a carrier pigeon. The pigeon carried a 4GB memory stick 60 miles in 2 hours. In the same amount of time, the broadband connection had transmitted 2% of the data. Pigeon 1, broadband nil.

Is this really news? First, how fast was the broadband connection? 2% of 4GB is 80MB. 80MB/7200s = 11KB/s. OK, that's pretty slow. For comparison, I just ran a speed test against a server about 60 miles away. The download speed was about 14Mb/s, or about 2MB/s. That would bring me my 4GB in about 40 minutes. Pigeon 1, broadband 1.

But wait. I can only download as fast as the other end can upload. If the other end has my broadband connection, it can upload at about 360Kb/s or about 45KB/s. You read that right. My upload speed would appear to be about a fortieth of my download speed. That's about four times the speed of the South African connection, meaning I couldn't even get 10% of the data transmitted by wire before the pigeon reached its destination. Pigeon 2, broadband 1.

Hmm ... my ability to send large quantities of data -- movies, for example -- to the world at large is severely limited, but my ability to access said data from whoever can make it available quickly isn't. And my internet connection is provided by a Cable TV/old-school media company ... but I digress.

When I got the link about the South African pigeon, I immediately thought of Jon Bentley's classic Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. If you're interested in software engineering you could do worse than to stop reading this right now, go hunt down copies of these books and inhale them. The code samples are variously given in C, C++ and a procedural pseudocode reminiscent of Old High Algol, but just as Chaucer is worth the trouble of reading in the original, so too Bentley.

If you don't want to hunt down paper copies, check out the web site [The web site doesn't carry the entire book, but it's still well worth visiting. The book itself has been extensively updated in the recent second edition. There's even a little Java here and there, but only a little. The Labs is still the Labs, after all].

I assume you're back now and along the way noticed problem 11 in column 1 of Pearls:

11. In the early 1980's Lockheed engineers transmitted daily a dozen drawings from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) system in their Sunnyvale, California, plant to a test station in Santa Cruz. Although the facilities were just 25 miles apart, an automobile courier service took over an hour (due to traffic jams and mountain roads) [Ah, Highway 17. Good times, good times.] and cost a hundred dollars per day. Propose alternative data transmission schemes and estimate their cost.

The solution Lockheed came up with?

The computers at the two facilities were linked by microwave, but printing the drawings at the test base would have required a printer that was very expensive at the time. The team therefore drew the pictures at the main plant, photographed them, and sent 35mm film to the test station by carrier pigeon, where it was enlarged and printed photographically. The pigeon's 45-minute flight took half the time of the car, and cost only a few dollars per day. During the 16 months of the project the pigeons transmitted several hundred rolls of film, and only two were lost (hawks inhabit the area; no classified data was carried). Because of the low price of modern printers, a current solution to the problem would probably use the microwave link.

Pigeon 3, broadband 1.

For several obvious reasons I doubt that pigeons are going to be the optimum solution for most high-volume data transmission problems, but it certainly gives one pause to note that a generation after the Lockheed story, in the face of Moore's law and all that, pigeon power is still a plausible solution. At least compared to what passes for broadband here in the States.

Why should this be? Moore's law cuts both ways. In fact, it currently favors the pigeon. The South African test was done with a 4GB memory stick. Sticks of 16GB are now available. Leaving aside the question of whether a pigeon (or two) could carry more than one stick, even a single pigeon with a single 16GB stick could beat my download speed over a 60 mile course.

Memory sticks are getting bigger much faster than broadband is getting faster, if only because switching to a larger stick is much, much easier than switching broadband technologies.

This is all reminding me of my early posts on Jim Gray.