I'm trying to resolve something in my mind about the small world model and how it relates to Freenet. My understanding has been that the relation was in Freenet node location distances and my assumption was that the swapping algorithm was intended to optimized the "small world model" of an arbitrary set of connections such that, in my mind, it would theoretically settle on all nodes having a small world distribution of peers: increasing numbers of peers as shorter distances from a given node.
Toad has informed me on IRC a bit ago that the swapping algorithm does not make arbitrary interconnections achieve "small world", which leaves me with these questions: Is there more than one metric for which we are trying to achieve "small world"? If so, could that be confusing things for others as well? Can a given node and a list of potential peers be used to create a small world model, at least from the perspective of the given node? I assume this is somehow possible as I understand it that opennet will be doing this, Some of you may already know where I'm likely going with this. What can opennet built into fred do that a program like refbot.py couldn't do? Could refbot.py potentially say, add 50 peers and then remove (in an orderly fashion) all but 15 based on a small world location/distance distribution to achieve a small world model if say, all/most nodes were using this same algorithm?
