After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem, which is NP-complete. So, wouldn't this system require P = NP for it to have any viability at all when factoring in the effects of latency and downtime?
Most NP-complete problems can be approximated quickly enough for practical purposes.
Decentralized routing is a hard problem, but there has been a lot of research with pretty convincing results. I'm not sure if it scales to the size of the internet, though.
That's the point, though: I don't know if you can find an 'approximate' solution to decentralized routing, since you need precision. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles evidencing these convincing results? I'd be extremely interested in learning some more about this.
Difference in definitions: I read "approximate solution" as an "approximate route," as in the node choices are approximated (potentially leading to a wrong final node, or losing packets at a dead end). Instead, finding approximately the shortest route that doesn't lose packets and gets you to the correct node would presumably work.
You really just need to find some reasonable route. Your current routes are very unlikely to be the shortest / cheapest / metric of choice; they are mostly decided politically.
