From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Jun 26 2002 - 21:17:15 MDT
Hi,
I was brainstorming a bit about your P2P project, and came up with some
ideas. Just food for thought, nothing I'm taking too seriously at this
point ;)
First, one of the ways to attract funding to the project would be to create
a particular application with the P2P software, and get a decent-sized pool
of users.
One thing that people *could* do with P2P is distributed problem-solving.
You're aware of distributed.net and SETI@home and other similar projects ...
these are all purely client-server based though. A more innovatively
structured such application could attract a lot of attention.
There is a potential Novamente tie-in here, in that we could use Novamente
to do the problem-solving within the distributed architecture... Not a
super-smart Novamente install of course (we're assuming crappy commodity
PC's), but select bits of Novamente appropriately chosen...
Next question as one pursues this line of thinking: What is the particular
application, in the vein of finding extraterrestrial life or prime numbers
or protein-folding?
My first thought was the bio work we're now doing -- looking for patterns in
gene expression data. This is "searching for the cure for cancer" and hence
has some sex appeal...
Then I thought of terrorism. How about searching public info databases for
information pertinent to terrorism? There are some useful historical DB's
out there I believe. "Download this app and use your computer's spare
cycles to help fight terrorism!" has a certain mass appeal to it, nyet? ;->
I fully understand that such a project (anything vaguely in this vein) would
not bring anyone any revenue, but it could get a lot of press (esp. the
terrorism angle), which would open a lot of doors for funding. In the early
days of Webmind, our first real round of funding (not seed money) came on
the heels of a Wall Street Journal article about us...
Well anyway, at very least I hope the train of thought will amuse! ;>
-- Ben
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