The Physics of Friendship

Santosh Maharshi wrote to mention a Physorg story about a new way to model social networks. From the article: "Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical - and perhaps more rational - applications. The many factors that influence an individual's fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision. By modeling people's interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge 'in a very natural way.'"

Re:I think it's a ridiculous notion

[NichG]

Complete chaos is a lot more predictable than incomplete chaos. Incomplete chaos, you have to worry about when its ergodic and when it isn't. If there are aspects which are totally random, or at least sufficiently random that for all intents and purposes you can't predict the exact sequence of states then you can just use the distributions. The end result will be a theory that becomes more accurate the larger the system it's used to describe. It'll fail utterly on a group of three people but will work brilliantly on a group of three billion.

Link to the Physical Review Letter

[Hal-9001]

TFA has an off-by-one error on the paper number in Physical Review Letters. [aps.org] The actual citation is:

Marta C. González, Pedro G. Lind, and Hans J. Herrmann, "System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 088702 (2006). [aps.org]

Re:I think it's a ridiculous notion

[maize]

well, the law of large numbers kicks in surpisingly quickly for most systems (in most statistal analysis, the problem tends to be the provability of lack of bias in the sample group more then the sample size).

Further, someone above mentioned that emotions aren't logical. I would say that you're just making that judgement from the wrong perspective. The experience of an emotion might arrest our own consious facilities and the emotional response to any particular stimulus may not be the most optimised behavioral reaction for that particular situation, but emotional response is not optimised to modern life. It's optimised toward species survival across a span of hundreds of thousands (homo sapiens sapiens) to millions (mammalian inheritance) of years.

Re:Geeks are smart but when it comes to this stuff

[azaris]

It's as if they get retarded real quick. It's complicated, but if you want to make a science out of it, it's very stupid to focus on the "physics" of friendship. This is like focising on the "shape" of love, or the weight of emotion. Well okay, it does make sense to focus on these things, but why focus on these things?

Actually, it's not stupid at all. There is lots of research into building formal models that describe and explain human behaviour. Some of it is game theoretic, this I suppose statistical. Of course you can argue that comparing human relationships to molecules bouncing around randomly doesn't make for a good model, but that's another issue.

Re:Seldon

[Randolpho]

That was my first thought as well...

And, frankly, I was surprised that I got this far down the first page before it was mentioned! I think more /.ers need to turn in their geek badges. :)

Links to papers

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's Marta C. González's publications page [uni-stuttgart.de]. As you can see, the author is a hottie!

Here are links to the paper in PDF format [uni-stuttgart.de] and Postscript format [uni-stuttgart.de].