What Does The Internet Look Like?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday October 6, 2002 @07:09AM from the and-what-does-it-taste-like dept.

scubacuda writes "What does the Internet have to do with the network of sexual partners? More than you think, according to this Economist article on Albert-Laslo Barabasi's attempt to 'present a general framework for improving the accuracy of Internet models' by treating the net 'as though it were a natural phenomenom.' Dr. Barabasi's findings that the Internet is 'scale free' has a lot of interesting implications: resistance to human failures, as well as vulnerability to malicious attacks. Dr. Barabasi's goal is to create models that are 'statistically indistinguishable from the real Internet. When and if that is achieved, the models should have predictive, as well as descriptive, power.' (BBC and News Factor had stories on his work earlier)"

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Topology of the internet by grumpygrodyguy · 2002-10-06 07:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

Hopefully it's starting to look at lot more like this.

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The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Networks and models by Saeger · 2002-10-06 10:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

E.g. to fight crime, it does not pay to incarcerate minor felons. One has to take out the most important 'hubs', being the bosses.
Sure, it makes sense to go after the higher-ups in a hierarchy, but there isn't much point in doing that when those hubs get replaced in notime flat.
Take a drug kingpin down and there'll be more to take his place very soon after... just as there's millions of potential gnutella supernodes (superhubs) to replace the ones that dropoff (no, I'm not comparing drug dealers to p2p).
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Power to the Peaceful