Yeah - even without a complete model framework for
quantum gravity, if you take into account the
Holographic Principle, there is a theoretical limit on the amount of information stored in a particular location: 1 quantum bit per Planck area.
Numerically, if you have some super high density quantum ram dimm with a surface area of 10cm, it could contain theoretically as much as 10^{67} bits of information (that's about a million trillion trillion terabytes of storage - plenty of mp3's...).
Of course, this is just in theory... practical limits will be hit loooooong before that.
Brief technical follow up: (described more in depth in the original paper of Brin and Page) the PageRank^tm system
is pretty cool actually - it's smarter than just ranking each page based on the *number* of other external pages which link to it, the algorithm works effectively like this:
It can actually be described well as a recursive algorithm which takes each page, and ranks it based on the number of external pages which link to it. Then go through all of the pages again, and this time *weight* the links to a page based on their ranking in the previous run through (all the time normalizing based on the number of links *out* from the page that links to you).
Hmm... I am probably not describing this well, but as it's really a rather elegant mathematical relationship between the pages and the links, it's probably best described by the simple formula itself - the PageRank (R) of page P_j (which has O(P_j) links out from it [sorry - *not* O as in "Big O"], and N_j links to it (pages P_{a_i}, i running from 1...N_j) ) is:
(d is a damping factor i'm not sure why they included, between 0-1, they keep it from.85-.9)
So if a well linked to site links to you, and not many other places, then your site jumps in rank, as to all sites you rank to (but your relative "reputation" is divided evenly among the folks you link to - note the O_{a_i} in the denominator above). This makes it pretty resistant to porn sites making a bunch of pages all link to one main site to get it raised in rankings - if the secondary sites aren't linked to by anyone, their ranking is abyssmal, and won't help the main site much...
So I wouldn't quite call it "democracy"... maybe just popularity.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - even without a complete model framework for quantum gravity, if you take into account the Holographic Principle, there is a theoretical limit on the amount of information stored in a particular location: 1 quantum bit per Planck area.
Numerically, if you have some super high density quantum ram dimm with a surface area of 10cm, it could contain theoretically as much as 10^{67} bits of information (that's about a million trillion trillion terabytes of storage - plenty of mp3's...).
Of course, this is just in theory... practical limits will be hit loooooong before that.
Brief technical follow up: (described more in depth in the original paper of Brin and Page) the PageRank^tm system is pretty cool actually - it's smarter than just ranking each page based on the *number* of other external pages which link to it, the algorithm works effectively like this:
It can actually be described well as a recursive algorithm which takes each page, and ranks it based on the number of external pages which link to it. Then go through all of the pages again, and this time *weight* the links to a page based on their ranking in the previous run through (all the time normalizing based on the number of links *out* from the page that links to you).
Hmm... I am probably not describing this well, but as it's really a rather elegant mathematical relationship between the pages and the links, it's probably best described by the simple formula itself - the PageRank (R) of page P_j (which has O(P_j) links out from it [sorry - *not* O as in "Big O"], and N_j links to it (pages P_{a_i}, i running from 1...N_j) ) is:
R(P_j) = (1-d) + d ( Sum_{i=1->N_j} R(P_{a_i}) / O(P_{a_i}) )
(d is a damping factor i'm not sure why they included, between 0-1, they keep it from .85-.9)
So if a well linked to site links to you, and not many other places, then your site jumps in rank, as to all sites you rank to (but your relative "reputation" is divided evenly among the folks you link to - note the O_{a_i} in the denominator above). This makes it pretty resistant to porn sites making a bunch of pages all link to one main site to get it raised in rankings - if the secondary sites aren't linked to by anyone, their ranking is abyssmal, and won't help the main site much...
So I wouldn't quite call it "democracy"... maybe just popularity.