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Describing The Web With Physics
Fungii writes: "There is a fascinating article over on physicsweb.com about 'The physics of the Web.' It gets a little technical, but it is a really interesting subject, and is well worth a read." And if you missed it a few months ago, the IBM study describing "the bow tie theory" (and a surprisingly disconnected Web) makes a good companion piece. One odd note is the reseachers' claim that the Web contains "nearly a billion documents," when one search engine alone claims to index more than a third beyond that, but I guess new and duplicate documents will always make such figures suspect.
I'm confused. The subject of the article is "Describing the Web with Physics" while, to me, it looks like Describing the Web with Graph Theory or Mathematics. Is there not a distinction between math and physics?
There have now been several studies asserting that a concentrated attack on just the top 3% (or some other low percentage), in terms of connectivity, of the major hubs / backbones of the internet would result in some critical failure scenario such as fragmentation into small isolated clusters. But isn't this type of condition valid for a lot of systems besides the internet?
Consider this example, though it isn't meant to be analogous to the internet in any way. What if the President of the USA, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, the entire Senate, the entire House of Representatives, etc. etc. were simultaneously assassinated? Can you even imagine ensuing chaos? You can even throw in all the state Governers, whatever, but that still wouldn't come out to more than the top 0.0004% of the country's population, in terms of "political importance" or some other metric. Is this scenario plausible or worth worrying about? You decide.
- The One God of Smilies =)
"Never put off for tomorrow what can be avoided altogether"
...In the single Continuum of Chaos game. Seriously, the game is played in a universe consisting of one million sectors, each of which corresponds to a web page -- with multiple sub-pages. Google and the other engines can't really index it because it requires a log in. Further, even if they did log in they would run out of Antimatter long before they got through even a tiny fraction of the pages.
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The problem with getting rid of the current Internet is that we would probably lose the advantage of having scale-free topology ... something the PhysicsWeb article discusses at length. Scale-free topology is one of the key factors in keeping the current Internet stable and relatively fault tolerant even as the number of users have grown exponentially. I doubt that those who want to replace an open Internet would create a replacement that would incorporate this type of scale-free topology.
One odd note is the reseachers' claim that the Web contains "nearly a billion documents," when one search engine alone claims to index more than a third beyond that
...This expression predicts typically that the shortest path between two pages selected at random among the 800 million nodes (i.e. documents) that made up the Web in 1999 is around 19 assuming that such a path exists...
...the typical number of clicks between two Web pages is about 19, despite the fact that there are now over one billion pages out there...
Look deeper, grasshopper:
Hey, Timothy, next time try reading the article instead if skimming it.
There may be many reasons not to kill you, but among them is not that you'll be missed by NASA - The Long Kiss Goodnight
THat's not to say that understanding how the various layers of complexity architecture and dynamics won't provide an answer ... and not because I think such diciplines suck, but because we have and will continue to have commercial influences on how networks are established.
Certainly some, in fact many businesses will higher and follow good practice. The problem comes about when some large companies don't. Or worse when mergers and buyouts occur, e.g. Verizon, CIHost and a few others come to mind.
Not to sound anti-business, because business has footed much of the bill for Internet expansion ... but rather to voice concern that sometimes there is a big disparity between technical solutions and the shareholder's bottom line.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
In "Graph structure in the web," Kumar et al. divide 200 million web pages into four categories of roughly equal size:
So is your home page an innie or an outie?
Please don't take this the wrong way, but that's honestly the sort of question I'd expect from someone who doesn't understand computers.
While I believe in the possibility of machine intelligence (along with the moral, ethical, and most importantly philisophical questions that raises), the net is more of a data transfer mechanism than a processing mechanism. Short of very delibrate projects, such as SETI@Home, you just don't have your average machine on the net doing random computation. In that sense, the net really hasn't changed much since its inception. Further, if you did have a distributed consciousness, what would the consequences of lag, network outages, and outright crashes be? In that sense, it would be interesting to see if random/semi-random/genetic algorithms are capable of generating an intelligence capable of coping with such noise. However, I think such issues would rapidly kill off something before it became "evolved" enough to cope. If we do get an intelligence, I think it'll be something that happens on purpose. It may be distributed (maybe as a redundant, non-real-time simulation of a brain), but I doubt it'll be a spontaneous Skynet-like entity.