Deterministic, statistic, organic p2p…

[TankGirl]

Just a little thought for you to reflect on.

Centralized server-client technology is built on deterministic approach and logic. It's your server, under your control, running your software. You ask it to do certain things, and you expect it to serve you and your clients just as told. If your server stays up, you expect your service to stay up; if your server goes down, you know your service will go down.

Decentralized p2p is built on statistic approach and logic. You have a random collection of peers coming online and going offline unpredictably. You can't count on any particular peer to be online at any given time; instead you have to count on the statistic online habits of a peer population. You can't count on any particular peer to provide any critical resources at any given time; instead you have to maximize the statistical chances of having a critical amount of collective resources available most of the time.

The third logical approach is organic or bio-logical. Organic technology will be based on various biological ideas about how living systems sustain themselves, communicate with each other, grow, procreate and so on. Biological systems contain apparently both centralized and decentralized features but rather than being a mixture of the two opposite technologies they are really a class of their own, following their own functional logic. They are essentially self-organizing, self-sustaining, self-adjusting, self-defining entities. As that same description applies also perfectly to the various online groups and communities, organic logic and technology may prove out to be very useful for p2p, especially for socially intelligent p2p.

- tg

[doofus]

OK, this is one of those frustrating moments in life where earlier today I wrote a long and (at the time seemingly) lucid piece in response to this, only to have the Windows-hibernate demon expunge it from existance. Now I have the combination (can't-be-arsed/it'll-never-be-as-good-again)s and so here follows the terse and salient(?) points without the florid prose of yore:

I think TankGirl's onto something here but there's an awful lot of wank published along these lines and only a handful of things I've seen that seem to hold water... Not that there's *anything* wrong with poetry, mind you, just as long as the author (and audience) recognise it as such. Personally I think there's a lot more caught up in that third paragraph than meets the eye, and would be interested in teasing out some of the issues (over time).

I also wrote a potted history of Stuart Kauffman... if you don't know him Google his name and skim Order for Free, we can debate the fine print later.

Something that really interests me here is the (potentially enormous) potential for good old fashioned human Hubris when it comes to thinking about the differences between emergent self-organising behaviours in biological (sic) verses "social" systems. There are many pieces written about the latter that seem to imply a teleological aspect that I (for one) am simply not convinced is available to us (the details of which will get hashed out if anybody bothers to respond here).

Finally I stimbled (which was a typo, but I like it - cf: poetry, above ) across TouchGraph earlier today and found entering "www.p2p-zone.com" rather enlightening, since I happened to be deep in thought about the connectivity of social networks at the time... if anybody cares to come up with a pro-teleology argument perhaps they could illustrate the point with how p2p-zone might start socially networking itself a little more closely with it's neighbours? (or describe to me why this is naive?) Maybe this is old hat to you old-hands but hey, I'm still new here:

See you on the other side,
~d~

[multi]

we have neighbours ?

[Mazer]

Originally Posted by multi

we have neighbours ?

Yup.
You didn't forget, did you?

[Mazer]

Computer network teleogoly? Sounds like an interesting field to get into. A hundred years from now sociologists will study how the internet has affected world cultures both globally and locally, and in a thousand years paleoanthropologists will pour over Internet Archive and gmail databases studying our lives and our friendships. Maybe they'll see an organic structure in the connections we've made with each other, but since we're only small parts of this system it's difficult for us to see the big picture. Maybe our social spaces aren't organic, maybe they're crystalline or fractal in nature. The thing to remeber is that these computer networks don't perfectly mirror our social networks. There's a physical infrastructure and backbone that we don't need to be aware of in order to function as a community, but upon which the internet relies to do what it does.

Some people don't believe that design, devine or otherwise, has anything to do with biological evolution, but I don't think it can be denied that design is an integral part of technological evolution. People don't adapt themselves to their surroundings, they adapt their surroundings to themselves, and our creations are imbued with the purposes we intend for them. Teleology, while parallel to this discussion, doens't really apply here. If a computer network manifests aspects of organic function then it's probably because it is facilitating human communication. That doesn't mean that these systems never exhibit organic traits, but because they are subject to constant artificial selection by their users they will never develop complex organic systems on their own like the ones we see in biology.

[multi]

ah....the big p2p neighbourhood...:P

that llc touchgraph applet is pretty neat
sort of got lost in that awhile
philosophical naturalism of a social self-forming hierarchical network topography ...hmm

[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by doofus

Personally I think there's a lot more caught up in that third paragraph than meets the eye, and would be interested in teasing out some of the issues (over time).

Your observation is correct - the idea and the domain of organic logic is where things get real interesting regarding p2p, and I hardly opened the lid of Pandora’s Box with my opening comments...

I have elaborated the topic somewhat in my comments in a related thread at P2P Consortium but as this a new discussion with a new direction, let’s cover some ground afresh.

In logical terms, a functional WASTE group is a practical example of an organic entity living in cyberspace. As an organization it is virtually closed from the outside world: it maintains its integrity and structure mainly with direct internal communications; it is not confined to any particular spots in IP number space; it does not depend on external identity/location services like DNS. This organizational isolation is fully voluntary and conscious in nature: a group can use public channels for any communications at any time if it so wishes; it can have nodes running in fixed IP numbers for a more reliable peer recovery; it can utilize DNS addresses for similar purposes. Like other living entities, a WASTE group not only sustains its own structure and defines its own identity but also projects them outwards and interacts with them at its own will.

A WASTE group with enough active members to keep the mesh running non-stop, socializing and sharing files regularly with each other is clearly a self-organizing, self-controlling entity that enjoys a considerable autonomy in relation to its environment. Is it an autopoietic entity in Maturana’s sense?

"the relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity..." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137) Maturana notes ‘organization’ comes from the Greek and means ‘instrument’. By using this word for the essential, defining character of a system he focuses attention on "... the instrumental participation of the components in the constitution of the unity." (1975, p. 315) It is the organization of a system which defines its identity, its properties as a unity, and the frame within which it must be addressed as a unary whole.

My answer is: many of them are. WASTE software become available about 2 years ago, and there are many groups that have lived on from the early days of the software. The larger long-lived groups have kept successfully defining and redefining their group identities despite the occasional losses of old members and occasional introductions of new members. The phrase “the frame within which it must be addressed as a unary whole” gets an interesting and concrete meaning in case of WASTE. As the software forces the group to respect the basic formalism of public key exchange in the definition of its membership border, the public key infrastructure is the solid addressing and approaching frame for the group. Unless you get your own public key imported into group's public key pool, you have no way of addressing the group entity or interacting with it - unless of course the group consciously and voluntarily decides to hear you through some external channel (e.g. message board).

- tg

[Nicobie]

There is a very small chance that I understand this.

However I swear I'm gonna post a pic about it someday.

Hey man........... I'm starting to get serious now. I figured out that if I take small pics on my camera they download small enourh to upload. I think.

Hahahahahahahaa

Happy Fathers Day to all