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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"
*grin*
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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?
...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
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
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?
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.