Hi Brad,
I am interested in Skype of course as a VOIP provider for me personally. I
have just re-installed the client to chat with a potential collaborator. You
propose Skype as a communications backbone for Texai that solves all the
problems I foresee with getting past ISPs and home DSL/cable/wireless routers
to reach at-home Texai users. And I, as a result, agree that I will evaluate
Skype for this purpose should n2n, and all other open-source alternatives fail.
One of my self-imposed constraints is to develop free software (i.e. GPL) and
reuse open source solutions. Skype uses a proprietary protocol and is
closed-source. I suppose that client software that I write to their Java API
can be licensed GPL but the network itself is closed.
On the other hand n2n is GPL v3 and I should be able to borrow the most
relevant features of Skype for the Texai peer-to-peer communications backbone
that I will implement on top of n2n, should it actually work for me. From the
Wikipedia article on Skype:
* Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model
* three main entities: supernodes, ordinary nodes and the login server
* each client builds and refreshes a list of reachable nodes known as
the host cache.
* contains IP address and port numbers of supernodes
* supernodes relay communications to other clients behind a firewall
* any skype client can become a supernode if it has good bandwidth, no
firewall and adequate processing power
* the Skype user directory is entirely decentralized and distributed
among the nodes of the network—i.e., users' computers
* which allows the network to scale very easily to large sizes
(currently about 240 million users)[44] without a complex centralized
infrastructure costly to the Skype Group
A good article on the details of these featuresl is here. The most important
attributes of Skype are evidence that a peer-to-peer network can:
* scale to several hundred million users
* be done with no costly complex centralized infrastructureThanks so
much for your detailed technical suggestion.
Cheers.
-Steve
Stephen L. Reed
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
http://texai.org/blog
http://texai.org
3008 Oak Crest Ave.
Austin, Texas, USA 78704
512.791.7860
----- Original Message ----
From: Brad Paulsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 5:31:16 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
Steve,
This may be a naive question, but have you considered using Skype as a P2P
mechanism?
The Skype User Agent (UA) software has been downloaded 100's of millions of
times and the average number of users on-line at any given time is in the 8-11
million range. Skype publishes a (free) API specification for the UA which
includes their very powerful and user-friendly chat system. This system can
be used to host both group and public chats and also to upload/download any
type of file (typical uneven P2P file transfer rates, but it's very reliable
and accessible via the UA API). There are API's for Win32, Linux and
Macintosh. There is also, if memory serves, a Java-based API that should run
on any platform that has a JRE (although, the UA API is a text-based,
message-passing API and is, thus, only platform dependent at what Skype calls
the "Communications Layer"). And I notice just now, there's a new Python
wrapper for the API (again, available on any platform that can host the Python
run-time -- which list includes the usual
suspects). There can be multiple programs (Texai agents?) concomitantly
using the single Skype UA via the API on a single machine. Anyhow, you get a
very powerful VOIP/text chat P2P user agent for free. You don't need to
(can't, in fact) host the UA download site. You just put a Skype graphic on
your site that points to the Skype-hosted download site. Check out Skype's
developer site: https://developer.skype.com/.
Cheers,
Brad
P.S. The Texai server(s) could just be a Skype UA, with its own Skype
username. You could wrap any text-based application-layer protocol you'd want
to inside the Skype chat protocol. I can't recall if there is a limit to how
many users can be involved in a group or public chat session. I don't think
there is any limit.
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