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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.
100 million URLs on the net, 100 million URLs
Take one down, pass worms around,
99 million URLs on the net...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The important thing from that paper is on the growth of the web; and from Kumar's bowtie-theory paper, we also think that most of the web is growing in places where we can't see.
Can it have a soul?
Would a single cell know whether the whole thing has a soul or not?
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
I have to apologize for that one. I was VPN'ed in the other day and I opened MS Explorer on "\\internet". I accidentally selected "www" and hit CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-V. I guess the "Copy of www" and "Copy (2) of www" tripled the document count on some search engines. My bad.
If you misread everything else the way you misread this I doubt you understand the fundamentals of anything. The researchers make a clear distinction between physical networks and hyperlinks, calling them the 'internet' and the 'web' respectively. One of their suprising results is that the internet and web have similar network topologies. Or in their words
Why do systems as different as the Internet, which is a physical network, and the Web, which is virtual, develop similar scale-free networks?
They go on to describe some properties of scale free networks and mention some interesting examples from physics.
So, in summary, you have completedly misunderstood the article.
:wq
I believe that Mob Psychology might model the web better, particularly the growth patterns of the web, however I don't have any studies to prove it yet.
I's interesting though that every academic out here has tried to comment on completely unrelated fields usin the language of his area of expertise. I've seen studies by mathematicians who claim to be able to model the web, and even industrial design students who claim that the design-to-maturity process of a network of websited (a small subset of the web) is identical to the processes championed by industrial designers who led the way in Japan in the late 1970s.
This seems to suggest (to me anyway) that those who enguage in this cross-discipline analysis, are somehow unsatisfied with their chosen field and are trying to latch onto an area of study that is populat at a particular moment in time.
--CTH
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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?
What problem are you talking about? Their research found that the current structure of the internet is extremely resilient to random attacks. Yes, co-ordinated attacks against key routers could work, but every network has some vulnerability, and the best solution is probably just to make sure the few key routers are well-protected and hidden. As Mark Twain says, There's no problem that needs to be solved, so I don't know where you're going with this "Not to sound anti-business" rant. The current chaotic approach to building network infrastructure works great, just like many natural systems.
*grin*
my blog
As a senior undergraduate in combined honours physics and computer science, I hereby pronounce you a moron. The researchers first talk about the structure of the web (hyperlinks, etc.), then they talk about the physical structure (Achilles Heel, virus threshold, etc.). You must have missed the transition, Mullusk.
The interesting thing is that both the web and the physical network follow this power-law structure (or scale-free, as the "Physics Boys" call it).
Oh, don't think it's possible to study the physical structure of the internet? I'd like to introduce you to a new and powerful tool called traceroute [yes, that was sarcasm]. BTW, you can buy maps of the internet from ThinkGeek, in case traceroute is too much for you.
How the hell did that guy get modded up, anyway?
If you really want to worry about it, Tom Clancy has written "Executive Orders" for you, which starts with the scenario as described.
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.
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"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.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
It just seems appropriate that a Physics site called PhysicsWeb would have an article about Physics and the Web, don't you think?
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Most of their research seems to be on 'static pages'. They state that the entire internet is connected via 16 links (similar to the way that people are connected to 5-6 aquantances). I believe as the ratio of dynamic to static content on the internet increases, this will bring increase the total number of clicks that it takes to get one site to the next. For example, I could create a website that dynamically generates pages, the first 19 pages are all contained within my site and the 20th time that the page is generated, it contains a link to google.
The metric functions that they use are good for randomly connected maps, but they don't apply to the internet, where nodes are not randomly connected. Nodes cluster into a group depending on topic or categories. For example, one Michael Jackson site links to other Michael Jackson websites.
Keeping
The Code Red thing was interesting in the respect that, if it had worked, it would reveal just how *evil* homogeneity is. In nature, it leads to plagues and/or like disasters.
It turns out that computing may prove similar.
Different is good!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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?
this was going to show itself sooner or later. im no math guy, nor am i a computer guy. i am in fact a molecular biologist and i play with complex systems every day. i was thinking about how everything is connected to the net these days. cell phones, pda's, cars, even appliences. with all this stuff, the physical topology of the net is very dynamic, almost to the point its evolving on its own. despite the fact it is an entirely man-made thing, it looks very organic. all these complex systems look the same. as chaotic and complex as it is, it seems as tho someone (with too much time on their hands) saw how it is behaving like things found in nature. looks like i was thinking along the right lines.i just wonder with the speed of expansion what it will be like 5 years from now. i hope it doesnt develope morals...
"Alot of people don't know what they are doing...and most are pretty good at it." -George Carlin
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?
This is an idea that has certainly been discussed before, but the answer is "almost certainly not".
First of all, the formation of a scale free network was caused by measurable "evolutionary" pressures for fault tolerance. In the absence of some similar evolutionary advantage to developing a global conciousness, it doesn't seem likely that it would happen spontaneously.
On the other hand, if some (possibly unintentional) goal was aligned with that, I wouldn't be totally surprised if through maintenence and updates, some form of conciousness arose.
Except: characteristic time scales on the internet are very large compared to connections within the brain. Any large scale behavior, including conciousness, would be expected to be slower than a human brain by orders of magnitude.
The virus infection threshold is based on something like this model:
1) Some set of nodes are infected
2) Each of those nodes has a probability of X of infecting it nearest neighbors.
3) repeat
I just made that up, and there are many oportunities for variations (add the ability for nodes to be cleaned and/or vaccinated), but under models like this:
random networks have a critical threshold for X, above which they will infect the whole network, below which they will die out.
scale-free networks will have a macroscopic fraction of the network infected for any value of X.
First of all, there are additional features not caputred in this model, which could be important for "viruses" like Bliss which have an extremely low probabiliy of infection.
Second, the internet is not exactly a scale free network. As mentioned in the article, while the dominant behavior is a power law, if you go high enough, you find exponential cutoffs. This could cause some viruses to die out (I am certain Bliss isn't the only one that never made it).
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.