I just added a news item to the Freenet homepage linking to Oskar Sandberg's recently released thesis "Searching in a Small World".
Essentially, Oskar and I discovered that the original extremely simple approach Freenet uses to choose which nodes should connect to which other nodes, happens to lead to an optimal network structure. We did this by applying Freenet's approach to a simpler type of small world network that is much easier to analyze than the original Freenet proposal. Oskar went on to do a much deeper analysis of why this is the case from a mathematical perspective. This is described in his thesis. This is useful for a variety of reasons, including: * It provides a really simple, robust, and decentralized way to construct small world networks * It offers clues as to why small world networks might emerge in human relationships Find it here: http://www.math.chalmers.se/~ossa/lic.pdf Ian.
