--- "John G. Rose" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P nodes). Messages > > would be > > natural language text strings, making no distinction between documents, > > queries, and responses. Each message would have a header indicating the > > ID > > and time stamp of the originator and any intermediate nodes through > > which the > > message was routed. A message could also have attached files. Each > > node > > would have a cache of messages and its own policy on which messages it > > decides > > to keep or discard. > > > > The goal of the network is to route messages to other nodes that store > > messages with matching terms. To route an incoming message x, it > > matches > > terms in x to terms in stored messages and sends copies to nodes that > > appear > > in those headers, appending its own ID and time stamp to the header of > > the > > outgoing copies. It also keeps a copy, so that the receiving nodes > > knows that > > they know it has a copy of x (at least temporarily). > > > > The network acts as a distributed database with a distributed search > > function. > > If X posts a document x and Y posts a query y with matching terms, then > > the > > network acts to route x to Y and y to X. > > > The very tricky but required part of creating a global network like this is > going from zero nodes to whatever the goal is. I think that much emphasis of > a design needs to be put into the growth function. If you have 50 nodes > running how do you get to 500? And 500 to 5,000? And then if it goes down > from 50,000 to 10,000 fast how is it revived before crash? Engineering > expertise, ingenuity + maybe psychological and sociological wisdom can be > used to make this happen. And we all know that the growth could happen > quickly, even overnight.
Getting the network to grow means providing enough incentive that people will want to install your software. A distributed message pool offers two services: distributed search and a message posting service. Information has negative value, so it is the second service that provides the incentive. You type your message into a client window, and it instantly becomes available to anyone who enters a query with matching terms. > Then once getting to 10^9 nodes they have to be maintained or they can die > quickly and even instantaneously. How? A peer would a piece of software that people would use every day, like a web browser or email. People aren't going to suddenly decide to uninstall them all at once or turn off their computers. One possible scenario is a virus or worm spreading quickly from peer to peer. Hopefully there will be a wide variety of peers offering different services, so that individual vulnerabilities could affect only a small part of the network. > Having an intelligent botnet has its advantages. Once it's running and users > try to uninstall it the botnet can try to fight for survival by reasoning > with the users. You could make it such that a user has to verbally > communicate with it to remove it. The botnet could stall and ask things like > "Why are you doing this to me after all I have done for you?" User:"sorry > charlie, I command you to uninstall!" Bot:"OK let's cut a deal... I know we > can work this out..." Well, I expect the intelligence to come from having a large number of specialized but relatively dumb peers, and a network that can direct your queries to the right ones. Peers would individually be under the control of their human owners, just as web servers and clients are now. It's not like you could command the Internet to uninstall anyway. Eventually we will need to deal with the problem of the network becoming smarter than us, but I think the threshold of concern is when the collective computing power in silicon exceeds the collective computing power in carbon. Right now the Internet has about as much computing power as a few hundred human brains, but we still have a ways to go to the singularity. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=73000478-537c13
