On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 02:27:40AM -0700, Rudi Cilibrasi wrote:
> I do believe the results are significant in that they are not just a
> lucky run or fluke; I tried many different parameter combinations and
> have seen the SVM perform better in most cases.

I wasn't so much interested in the statistical significance of the 
performance difference between the algorithms - so much as whether their 
predictions were actually proving useful (for either algorithm)

> My
> suspicion is that the simple version of routing that I have heard about
> involving forwarding to "closest keys" may be creating some congestion
> bottlenecks or file "masking" effects, analogous to how a hash table using
> linear probing will create more clustered distributions than a hash
> table using a secondary hash function. 

I am not sure I understand what you mean here - these clustered
distributions in hashtables are caused by key-collisions which, given
that we are using 160 bit hashes - will never realistically happen in
Freenet.  Keys do cluster in Freenet, we call this specialization, but 
it is a desirable effect - and indicates that a node is well integrated 
into the network.

> I think it's clear that there will
> be some sort of "self-organizing complexity" as Wolfram would phrase it,
> but am still trying to decide how we might characterize and measure
> different large-scale network behaviors when under the control of different
> routing schemes.

Well, there have been extensive simulations of the current "closest 
keys" scheme.  In terms of trying NGrouting - we can make some useful 
measurements locally - such as the distribution of incoming requests - 
and the average difference between estimated and actual routing times.

>  Perhaps it will be useful to add some optional
> request-tracking to the protocol so that we can look at actual traces of
> a query flowing through the Freenet, and see where the actual holdup
> occurs, usually.  

About a year ago we did something like this - there is a parameter you 
can set called "watchme" in the config which will cause your node to 
upload message data to a central database.  You can see a graph of an 
actual request here:

   http://freenetproject.org/ss/index.php?page=7

We haven't used this functionality in quite a while - although we could
reinstate it.  For security, nodes with their "watchme" parameter set
were forbidden from communicating with non-watchme nodes, meaning that
they formed a completely separate network.  This raised the question of 
how representative the watchme network was of the real network, but it 
was the best we could realistically do.

I think the more immediate test will be just to let NGR loose in the 
network and monitor locally collected data to evaluate its performance 
relative to the current scheme.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Clarke                                                  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Coordinator, The Freenet Project              http://freenetproject.org/
Founder, Locutus                                        http://locut.us/
Creator, WhittleBit                               http://whittlebit.com/
Personal Homepage                                   http://locut.us/ian/

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