There are ways that you could use SIP and RTP. I'm not advocating it but it is something that has crossed my mind many times. The conclusion that I've arrived at is a custom protocol modeled after telephony protocols since usurping existing ones can be a major PIA. But Skype does look good and they have LOTS of installs. existing telephony protocols though have some serious limitations which a distributed AGI could benefit from - for example modulating various stream properties, including time to destination and definitely packet payload size plus other attributes..
John From: Stephen Reed [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 8:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] organising parallel processes Hi Brad, I am interested in Skype of course as a VOIP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 <http://www.ntop.org/n2n> , and all other open-source alternatives fail. One of my self-imposed <http://texai.org/blog/2008/05/07/the-challenge-ahead/> 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 <http://www.ntop.org/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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer> model * three main entities: supernodes <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_%28networking%29> , 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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_%28networking%29> of the network-i.e., users' computers * which allows the network to scale very easily to large sizes (currently about 240 million users)[44] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#cite_note-43> without a complex centralized infrastructure costly to the Skype Group A good article on the details of these featuresl is here <http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/%7Elibrary/TR-repository/reports/reports-2004/c ucs-039-04.pdf> . 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 infrastructure Thanks 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. _____ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. 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