The Physics of Friendship

Santosh Maharshi wrote to mention a Physorg story about a new way to model social networks. From the article: "Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical - and perhaps more rational - applications. The many factors that influence an individual's fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision. By modeling people's interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge 'in a very natural way.'"

Comments

Re:I think it's a ridiculous notion

[NichG]

Complete chaos is a lot more predictable than incomplete chaos. Incomplete chaos, you have to worry about when its ergodic and when it isn't. If there are aspects which are totally random, or at least sufficiently random that for all intents and purposes you can't predict the exact sequence of states then you can just use the distributions. The end result will be a theory that becomes more accurate the larger the system it's used to describe. It'll fail utterly on a group of three people but will work brilliantly on a group of three billion.

Link to the Physical Review Letter

[Hal-9001]

TFA has an off-by-one error on the paper number in Physical Review Letters. The actual citation is:

Marta C. González, Pedro G. Lind, and Hans J. Herrmann, "System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 088702 (2006).