Category: Complexity

(naive idea!) Do Wikis have a fixed-point?! I guess depending on the content and the diversity of commonsense in that subject, they may have a vast range of dynamical behaviors, e.g. stable to a fixed-point (i.e. everyone agrees), limit-cycle (i.e. two diffent controversial belief about the subject), or even richer behaviors such as time-varying limit-cycle (i.e. dialectic dialog), or chaotic.
It is an interesting subject to work on. If you have any idea, please share it. If I find some interesting work, I will give a link to them.

And now, introducing Complexity Papers Online. You can find a lot of different papers, dissertations, and also links to other paper collections related to complexity theory. It is evident that there is no close definition for complexity and it ranges from learning and evolution to chaos theory. Anyway, it looks worthy.

Have you ever heard of “Small World Network” or something so? The birth of Orkut encouraged me to see if I can find any related result that show what would happen in this network. As you may have noticed, your connection path length is a small number (mine is 2.8 currently connecting about 320K people), though you feel familiar with your network (it is clustered). D. Watts and S. Strogatz in their “Collective dynamics of small-world networks” (*) showed that this property is possible for small-world networks. This kind of network can be considered as a regular graph with some perturbation in its regularity. They hypothesized that social networks are of this kind and proved their claim by considering some different natural networks like actor networks, power-line networks (yes! It is not a social one!!) and neural network of a worm. I think Orkut is a fascinating resource for these kinds of research.
(*): D. J. Watts and S. H Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of small-world networks,” Nature, vol. 393, pp. 440-442, 1998.