Since I started my PhD in August I am now rapidly nearing the 3 months mark. Having spent the past couple of months doing mainly just reading to try and get up to speed on the background, I am now starting to work on writing a review paper, reviewing methods for wildcard search over structured peer-to-peer overlays.

Although not related to searching, I came across a rather interesting paper about using peer-to-peer technology in MMORPGs the other day which some day I’d love to follow up on, given the time…

Abstract – We present an approach to support massively multi-player games on peer-to-peer overlays. Our approach exploits the fact that players in MMGs display locality of interest, and therefore can form self-organizing groups based on their locations in the virtual world. To this end, we have designed scalable mechanisms to distribute the game state to the participating players and to maintain consistency in the face of node failures. The resulting system dynamically scales with the number of online players. It is more flexible and has a lower deployment cost than centralized games servers. We have implemented a simple game we call SimMud, and experimented with up to 4000 players to demonstrate the applicability of this approach.