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The Physics of Friendship

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the people-in-three-dimensional-space dept.

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.'"

7 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. emerge 'in a very natural way.' by slashflood · · Score: 5, Funny

    Calculating dependencies
    emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "in a very natural way.".

  2. Re:What are the applications? by mattjb0010 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Hey baby, wanna bounce off me in an enclosed area?"

  3. I think it's a ridiculous notion by elucido · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I do not think friendships work in such a way that math can literally outline the direction they are headed. Friendship is based on loyalty, when someone involved is disloyal it usually ends, and this can happy at any time. So friendships by nature come and go, and all relationships are temporary. The goal in this I suppose is to try to find patterns, so here is a pattern

    If you want to have stronger friendships, have leverage, enough money, or charisma to keep people hovering around you. These variables can be added into the equation and then there are patterns, but if you just look at it emotionally then it will be complete chaos because emotion is not logical. There are logical elements of friendship, logical components, and logical tools which one can use to keep a friendship together or tear it apart.

  4. The nature of friendship changes over time. by elucido · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In highschool there is very few real friendships. Most of the time its just recognizeable faces, or people who are cool but don't actually matter.

    When you get to college and beyond is when you begin to build your true friendships, and these friendships arent based on emotion anymore because by this age usually a person has the ability to reason and filter out the people they don't want. By this time people usually have a laser like focus on exactly the personality types they get along with and know how to avoid the personality clashes which don't mix.

    Loyalty is glue.It holds a relationship together. Keep your word and your word means something, commit to friendships as one commits to family and you'll have something to protect. Without loyalty, friendship is just familiar faces and cool people who you talk to on a regular basis but who don't matter and who you don't miss when they are gone.

    I think theres room for both friends, and cool people, but relationships based on coolness are completely based on logic.If they are useful to you, and you are useful to them, if they and you both have reasons to hang around each other, business reasons, then these relationships last as long as there is mutual benefit.

    The emotional relationship can end overnight when someone cusses the other out. So logic is a core component of any relationship. Emotion is a component as well, but emotion cuts both ways, and usually emotional relationships do not and cannot last.

  5. social networks are isolated in science by funkelectric · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It is amazing how nearly all of the social networks literature I have come across has blanked out the concepts of cluster analysis and graph partioning. It seems a very in-bred discipline bent on reclustering the same old karate club over and over again. To some extent this is unfair as social networks can probably be viewed as a relatively early application of clustering in the setting of graphs. But the rest of the world has caught up if it ever was behind (biology, pattern recognition, data-mining, market-research, document clustering - the list is basically endless). It is well known that every field of research basically likes to reinvent cluster analysis all by itself, but social network people seem particularly inept at integration. Then, somehow a social network article comes up here at SD every odd couple of months as if the next coming has arrived. In this case we are extremely fortunate to witness a deep connection between bouncing particles (wow! physics!) and human actors. Hopefully Dan Brown takes notice.

    Disclaimer: I have skimmed the fine article as found on ArXiv, and apart from the obligatory and tiresome small-word references found little to get excited about either way. This rant merely applies to the entire field.

  6. Seldon by kid-noodle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sure I've been beaten to this observation.. But this is essentially the basis of Hari Seldon's [Isaac Asimov's) psychohistory - he developed the idea based on the physics which were being used to model particle movements in gases.

    Score one for sci-fi?

    --
    fortune -o
  7. Re:Geeks are smart but when it comes to this stuff by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

    no, READ the ROADMAP. I'm sick of reading posts like this.

    human social interaction v 1.0 will be in Geek 2.1.0.4.5. Not 2.0.

    people like you who can't be bothered to make any effort installing CVS (make SURE you use cvs-unstable-12-Mar-2006-0435am or later or your machine WILL be DESTROYED. DO NOT POST HERE COMPLAINING IF THIS HAPPENS!!!) and setting up a local CVS branch and pulling the latest unstable-tainted roadmap aren't worth talking to.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;