This stuff has just been in the air the past few years - Network coding ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/contentdist.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.ed

This stuff has just been in the air the past few years - Network coding ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/contentdist.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/contentdist.pdf ) does the inverse operation to increase efficiency in Bittorrent-like distribution schemes. It is quite cool that randomness can help in both the creation and solving of these problems.