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Abstract: "Scalability, fast response time, and low cost are of utmost importance in designing a successful massively multiplayer online game. The underlying architecture plays an important role in meeting these conditions. Peer-to-peer architectures, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs and can achieve high scalability. They can also achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players. However, these architectures face many challenges. Distributing a game among peers makes maintaining control over the game more complex. Peer-to-peer architectures also tend to be vulnerable to churn and cheating. Moreover, different genres of games have different requirements that should be met by the underlying architecture, rendering the task of designing a general purpose architecture harder. Many peer-to-peer gaming solutions have been proposed that utilize a range of techniques while using somewhat different and confusing terminologies. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of current peer-to-peer solutions for massively multiplayer games using a uniform terminology"

"Last Halloween, while his friends were out reveling, Otavio Good stayed home to design a computer program to reconstruct shredded documents. The military's research arm had issued a call for people to decipher messages that had been torn to bits, much the way someone might destroy evidence of a paper trail."

Abstract: "The most popular Facebook games are being played by millions of users, sometimes only a few weeks after introduction. Although several of these games and their users have been studied, there currently exists no open-source version of such a game. In this thesis we present the design, implementation, and performance analysis of WebHack, a Facebook-integrated multiplayer game. WebHack is built upon the classic, but still popular, game of Nethack. We discuss the technical difficulties with file handles, process limits, communication networks, and handling failures. Further, we consider aspects specific to legacy applications, for example legal issues and technical limitations. We propose methods to circumvent these issues, and show a successful integration of the legacy game Nethack into our Facebookintegrated game system. We present the design of our system and evaluate the performance of the design in various scenarios. Among other results, we show that WebHack is a highperformance system, able to support over 300,000 concurrent players, handle arrival rates for up to 1,750 new players per second for over 60 seconds, and is able to recover within 10 seconds from a server failure."