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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Ian Clarke <ian AT freenetproject.org>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Think cash
  • Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 21:18:04 -0800

On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 09:00:32PM -0500, Michael J Freedman wrote:
> I have some concerns as to the real viability of "Think Cash" in a
> distributed P2P environment.

No interesting problem is ever easy.

> First of all, I think this is actually an incredibly difficult problem
> which you suggest.

Again, no interesting problem is ever easy ;-)

> You mention the Turing test. Unfortunately, V in that system is a human,
> not a computer. The ability for computers to perform natural language
> processing is fairly well along, but it's definitely *not* a light-weight
> operation. But language understanding is much further back, especially if
> your language domain is fairly large. For example, MIT LCS's Spoken
> Language Systems group has good working systems for language understanding,
> but each system only handles a small "problem:" the weather, driving
> directions, airplane reservations, etc.

Yes, but if you read on you see that I am actually talking about setting
up the system in such a manner that the humans in the system actually
test each other, and are incentivised to do a good job. Again, this
would be difficult to arrange, but not necessarily impossible.

> >The seeds of a solution
> >I started to think about whether it would be possible to create a system
> >where all the users, while being tested by the system, were actually
> >testing each-other too. Each user might be asked to provide an answer to
> >a question which will demonstrate their intelligence, to provide a
> >question which will test someone else's intelligence, and to give an
> >opinion as to the answers given by a number of other people to several
> >questions. Failure to do any of these things to the best of their
> >ability may result in their submission not being accepted.
>
> This proposals layering many two-way interactions in the "intelligence
> testing" protocol. It also suggests that users -- who use the system with
> widely varying educational backgrounds, computer literacy, cultures,
> comprehension of the technologies involved, etc. -- to "judge" each other's
> intelligence.

As someone who has spent several years studying Artificial Intelligence
(and being largely disappointed by it), one of the most interesting
things is that the hardest things for a computer to do, tend to be the
easiest things for a human to do, and the converse is also true. I
don't think these exchanges would need to test anyone's computer
literacy, or educational qualifications. As for cultural differences,
that is hardly a problem on the Internet of today! (How many of you are
*not* white middle-class males?). Again, I think that you are judging
this too harshly, I am not saying that this would be easy, or even
possible, but it is fun to think about it, and who knows, maybe
something useful will emerge.

> Make the problems too hard, and your false negatives go way up. Make the
> problems too each, and I'll write an automated simulator that'll convince
> most of them. Your false positives go up. Throw some machine learning in
> there? Then you get away from the "user-interaction" model and you added
> lots of complexity.

This is the nice thing about the "reflected turing test" approach, it is
a difficult test, but the computer doesn't really have to do the testing
(although it does have to arrange things carefully).

> When you aren't formalizing the problem -- like hash cash, client puzzles,
> Naor/Dwork's paying for processing -- you aren't establishing complexity
> classes, in any sense, for the issues at hand.

I am not sure what you mean here, but it sounds like you are saying that
there is no point in speculation. If that is the case, how do you ever
think of anything original or interesting?

> >None the less, at least this suggests that a robust think-cash mechanism
> >is a possibility. As the threat of malicious attacks on the Internet get
> >more and more serious, people may be forced to adopt a mechanism such as
> >this.
>
> I fear "robust" is something that hardly applies.

Why not? Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it is
impossible. Freenet showed me that.

> Your goal might be an admirable one, but I am very hesitant to think that a
> "Think Cash" system as you describe is realizable in the near- to medium-
> future.

So much pessimism in one so young.... ;-)

Ian.

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