--- "J. Andrew Rogers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There is an increasingly strong political incentive (between > countries) to create distributed indexes, but quite frankly the > technology does not exist. This was something I studied in earnest > when various governments started demanding such guarantees. To the > best of my knowledge, we do not have mathematics that can support the > guarantees desired, though decentralized indexes are certainly > practical if one ignores certain considerations that are politically > important.
I would think that governments would be threatened by a distributed index. It would make file sharing networks useful to the point of replacing the client-server model. There would be no way to block "undesirable" material such as copyrighted movies, child porn, jihadist literature, etc. But that's not really my interest. I'm interested in making the internet more useful. I agree we don't have the mathematics to guarantee results. My arguments are based on economics. Peers have an economic incentive to cooperate, to supply useful and accurate information, and establish a reputation so they can sell advertising. They have an incentive to use the same language as most other peers, so the protocol should converge. They have an incentive to specialize in niches left unoccupied by others, so the collection becomes an AGI. > Something to understand about the big server clusters: as commonly > implemented, the online server cluster is independent of the content > generation cluster. Queries may be very cheap to serve even if the > aggregation and analytics process is expensive. Compute a result once > and serve it to the world a thousand times. The real problems occur > when the data set is not sufficiently static that this trick is > plausible. Fortunately, no one has noticed the man behind the curtain > (yet). That is the problem I am addressing. CMR makes no distinction between queries and documents. They are just messages. It does not matter which is posted first. If they are a close match, then each goes to the originator of the other. You could initiate an interactive conversation by posting a message about anything to nobody in particular, and it will go to anyone who cares. > Losing to Google is predicated on following their path, and they > occupy a space where the computer science is transparently > inadequate. It does not take much of a qualitative shift in the > market to kill a company in that position. There is plenty of > vulnerability left in the market. I think Google will initially be a peer with a high reputation, but they will have to adapt to the new model. CMR needs to interact cleanly with the existing web in order for it to take off. A simple peer might just forward anything that looks like a query to Google and maybe a few other search engines. > I would argue, from a business perspective, is that most of the value > with respect to distribution is in the metadata protocol, virtually > all of which are based on naive designs that ignore literature in > practice. A really strong metadata protocol that could be standardized > would generate a hell of a lot of value. Past that, whoever controls > the essential data under that protocol would win, and for better or > worse, Google is largely not responding to this. There are many types > of data they have no capacity to handle in bulk. This is not so much a > criticism of Google but an observation about their actual behavior. Nobody will control any critical part of the network. That is the beauty of it. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
