Greetings Freenet Developers, First, let me congratulate you all on creating the tremendously important Freenet project. I am an open-source developer and PhD student in the Netherlands. I have been following the Freenet project for some years now, and just recently came across Ian's article describing the idea for next-generation routing, whereby each node keeps statistics on other nodes in order to make predictions on response times, etc. When I read the part about predicting expected latency, it occurred to me that this is an instance of a well-studied machine-learning problem that is often called supervised regression. As machine learning is my field of study, I thought I might be able to help you all avoid needlessly reinventing the wheel.
There are some excellent new algorithms that have come out in the last ten years that address this class of problems, and my research involves them. I believe that two approaches, termed Support Vector Machines and Relevance Vector Machines (SVM and RVM) would work well for this problem. These are both examples of the kernel-machine class of algorithms; you can get some technical background on these methods at http://www.kernel-machines.org/ as a start. If you would like to see some samples of my prior work, feel free to check out my homepage at http://www.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/ I at this moment am involved in the rubysvm project, a Ruby binding to libsvm, which is a very concise SVM package that has both C++ and Java versions. See http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/ for more on this. I wanted to get the groups opinion on if an "industrial strength" learning algorithm would be useful for your FreeNet system, and would like to offer my assistance in implementing this if you think it's relevant. Cheers and thanks for starting such a great project, Rudi Cilibrasi Machine-Learning Researcher http://www.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/ CWI, Amsterdam, NL _______________________________________________ devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
