[e2e] Skype and congestion collapse.

[Richard Gold]

>  >>> btw, TCP friendliness _is_ selfish - its in your own interest to do as you
>  >>would be done by.
>  >>that seems strange to me. can you elaborate?
>  
> read the selfish gene (latest edition) for example, or the
> hostdter work on the iterated prisoners dilemma - cooperative behaviour
> can (and does) evolve _out of_ purely selfish strategies - its basd on the 
> notion investigated in social situations by axelrod where you _evolve_ your 
> strategies over a number of encounters - this gets over any explicit cooperation, but 
> allows the system of individuals to exchange experience effectively but implicitly 

I think Jon is referring to Douglas Hofstadter (who wrote Gödel, Escher, 
Bach among other things), Prisoner's Dilemma stuff can be found here:
http://www.magnolia.net/~leonf/sd/pd-brf.html

An example closer to home might be Bit Torrent's Tit-for-Tat algorithm. 
This algo encourages co-operation by making it in your best interests to 
co-operate. Altruism is present, however, in the start up phase when a 
client connects to a seed. The seeds are clients with full copies of the 
file that behave altruistically. When clients are downloading from other 
clients (also called leechers) the TfT algo kicks in and you need to 
upload to clients you are downloading from in order to maximize your own 
downloading speed (otherwise you become "choked"). Et voilà, 35% of 
Internet traffic is Bit Torrent!

 > (as with the oft over-cited commons tragedy).

...and oft over-cited end-to-end principle etc. ;-)

Cheers,

Richard

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