I have finished the first chapter of Game Theory for Applied Economists. So far my biggest problem is that I don't know economics terminology, but that is a small hurdle. I am hoping to use game theory to work out the payoffs for file leaching. Then to setup a system where one gets the best payoff for acting honestly. I have taken a stab at a protocol to enforce this using ripped coins, but I need to go over it at least once more before I will be actually ready to believe in it. (Never mind show it to others.)
So far game theory has been interesting, and surprisingly, not wholly intuitive. Probably part of that is its assumption that all players are rational, or that one understands the payoff of another person. Both of those assumptions often turn out to be false. The most trivial example comes from the prisoner's dilemma, probably the best known example of game theory. Most analysis only deals with the payoff in terms of jail time, where as most people would think about many other factors such as loyalty, and their future safety. (The link actually talks a bit about this, but most treatments I have read skip this.)
Mnet
I finished my lookup code that uses a distributed hash table, Khashmir. The only problem
lies in the fact that Khashmir now uses sqlite, and it does not want to work on my
system. I tested sqlite, and it seems to be ok, but whenever I run the unit tests for
Khashmir I get an error about too many open files, or
"pysqlite_exceptions.OperationalError: database is locked". Maybe its a thread safety issue?
But it works for other people, and it never works for me. I will have to keep playing
with it.