Linked

The one advantage of long plane flights is the time to reflect without distraction. (Well, there are still some distractions… The travel map has new meaning as it charts lands I have never visited. I wonder what my flickr friends are doing as I pass overhead.)

I also got the chance to read and finally finish a blog item that I have been mulling over at a number of geek conferences of late.

I enjoyed Albert-László Barabási’s book Linked, in which he describes the topological robustness and power laws of scale-free networks. These common patterns arise when a network grows with preferential attachment of new members, and thus they describe most complex networks of interest (Internet, dating, power grids, genomes and proteomes, corporate Board seats, etc.).

The most interesting passage to me related to the blog musings I was trying to pull into some coherency on the dichotomy of design and evolution as fundamentally divergent processes for building complex systems. He writes:

“While entirely of human design, the Internet now lives a life of its own. It has all the characteristics of a complex evolving system, making it more similar to a cell than a computer chip. Many diverse components, developed separately, contribute to the functioning of a system that is far more than the sum of its parts. Therefore Internet researchers are increasingly morphing from designers into explorers. They are like biologists or ecologists who are faced with an incredibly complex system that, for all practical purposes, exists independently of them.” (pp.149-50.)