Flooding in real life

In my masters I had a class called Middleware Technologies and somewhere in the middle of the semester we spoke about something called— what you think it is? — you are damn right, flooding.

The goal of flooding is to reach all the peers in a network with — most of the times and if you are a good person — useful information. In computer science, networking specific, we call this as “packets” which represent a part of a bigger information encoded in 0s and 1s and which is recognized between machines.

How the algorithm actually works?

It’s not that hard, it’s like playing the broken telephone game, a person shares a sentence with another person and the latter will also share with another one, and that goes on and on until it reaches the last one. This is flooding, you just need to add the fact that instead of spreading the information one by one, in real scenarios the information will be spread to multiple persons at a time.

Why is this algorithm a beautiful match with reality?

1. You can see this behavior in a virus (based on the current events with the new coronavirus in the flesh world, this was actually the main motivation for this article)
2. Most of the gossip works like this as well :)
3. Have you ever heard the sentence “bad news travel fast”?
4. In a more positive way, if you do something to someone, that person will transmit that same behavior to others. Maybe you should give more love sometimes :)

How can this be applied in a good way?

Well besides item 4, regarding our current situation with coronavirus I would like to give you a new perspective, a more technological one, based on my humble knowledge in the field.

This was retrieved from a presentation of mine about a paper on the same class. I know the last image can be a little dramatic but it’s kinda real :D

Flooding has a problem, if we are talking about item 1 combined with item 2 or 3, we can understand how fast something bad can be spread. We can understand how fast a virus can reach the other side of the world. So, to fight this, we as peers and astonishing gamers in broken telephone (actually I am not such a good player on this), we need to break this chain. That’s our responsibility for the rest of the network that we all have been connecting on — and no, I am not talking about digital network, although you should be careful with fake news! This will be our job for now.

Meanwhile we have developers trying to implement the ultimate anti-virus, also known by vaccine. Which is a nice think, of course, but there is another problem concerning this. Right now, we are all trying to make self isolation/quarantine/other-badass-cientific-word-that-I-don’t-know-about-it, which is a well paid position by the way (yes, a well paid one, you get to live you little one) but we also need to have self-aware of the meaning of the effectiveness of the vaccine.

The little gray guy represent the people who are isolated

Once it exists, if you don’t take the vaccine you will probably infect other ones who never had the virus and depending on the effectiveness of this anti-virus (it could be only a temporary treatment and not a cure, as you may know some vaccines have durability they are not a thing that will remain forever in your body, like the one for common flu), you will be spreading the virus again :). Not a good thing fellow guy/girl.

Last reminder, don’t forget to be a virus on love matters, we need to be good and kind to each other :D.