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Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

I haven't read this book, but from the review it's clearly one to track down and throw on the (growing) pile. [Link]

Two network phenomena are of special interest to researchers: synchronization and connectedness. Synchronization refers to the way in which networked elements, due to their dynamics, communicate and exhibit collective behavior. Connectedness describes the architecture of networks. For example, are there just a few highly connected "hubs" (think airline route maps) from which lots of short hops are made? Or is everything connected to everything else in a way that has no recognizable, simple structure? Connectedness is an important aspect of networks that determines, among other things, their efficiency and their vulnerability. We now know that many real networks are not random collections of nodes and links. Real networks are connected in special ways that have functional significance. Perhaps no one has been closer to the epicenter of the recent progress than Steven Strogatz, the author of the smart, carefully written, and fascinating account that is Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.

To my surprise, only at the end of the book does Strogatz devote a slightly short chapter to what is perhaps his most widely recognized work: the field of small−world networks. The prime example is known as "six degrees of separation," which refers to the parlor game in which one tries to link a given actor to a target (historically actor Kevin Bacon) through the smallest chain of movies sharing common costars. Strogatz describes how small−world networks are intermediate between regular and random networks. A few shortcuts that link random points in a regular network have a drastic effect on the connectivity: The average path length goes down significantly, while the local order in the network is hardly affected. Small−world networks have been found in numerous situations, such as in the nervous system of the worm C. elegans, the US power grid, and the Internet. But their influence is not always benign: Viruses and epidemics, for example, can easily spread globally.

jon posted this at 7:38 AM
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