Interesting article in the Technology Review: “The Social Life of Routers: How a 1960s sociology experiment could hold the key to better Internet routing“. It’s about how sociologist Stanley Milgram’s research into social networks may provide clues on ways to better transmit data across the Internet.
Milgram gave volunteers the task of forwarding a letter to a stranger by sending it to friends or acquaintances that might be one step closer to the target. Milgram measured how many hops there were between the sender and the end recipient, and found it to be, on average, 5.2. (The term “six degrees of separation” was coined later by playwright John Guare.)
In 2000, inspired by Milgram’s work, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, in New York, created a mathematical model for routing information across any kind of network. Kleinberg says that he drew from the fact that Milgram “demonstrated not just that short paths were present in large social networks, but that people — operating without a global view of the network — could efficiently find them.”
… the work of Kleinberg and others can be applied to real-world networks and, specifically, could be used to design a protocol that allows routers to keep track of less information about a network, thereby reducing congestion.
The key lies in identifying “hidden” bits of information that could help routers decide where to send a packet, Boguñá says. The people in Milgram’s experiment used such information to figure out how to forward their letters. Instead of passing them on to a random friend, they identified criteria, such as a person’s profession, that meant that they might be a step closer to the intended recipient. The work of Boguñá and his colleagues focuses on identifying and exploiting hidden information on other kinds of networks. In the case of Internet routing, the physical location of a router or the type of information it last handled could provide useful clues for forwarding information toward a final destination without knowing the complete structure of the network.
I like this idea being part of the flow (the solution) even if you can’t see the bigger picture.
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