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IcerocketHow Many Licks Does it Take To Get to the Center of the Internet?
Posted 06.18.2007 at 12:45 pm
20 Comments
The Internet may be referred to as the "information superhighway," but a better analogy might be an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop. Check out this colorful new Internet map (click the image to enlarge) from physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and you’ll see what we mean. It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web. At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs. The trouble with being on the periphery is that your data must travel through the congested center, which is sort of like flying through O’Hare on your way from New York to Los Angeles. Basically, it’s really inefficient. The researchers don’t offer much in the way of solutions but say their model will help scientists better track the evolution of the Web, which in turn will help people innovate ways to make it less like a lollipop and more like, well, a superhighway.
If want to learn more about the map and you’re undaunted by math speak like “k-shell decomposition,” “percolation theory,” and “fractal geometry,” download the paper. —Nicole Dyer
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Comments
The link to the paper is broken.
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulWhat are the size and color scales representing?
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulFew comments and corrections
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpful1. The Internet map comes from new data on the structure of the Internet, available at www.netdimes.org. Everybody are encouraged to visit our website and contribute some measurements to make the maps more accurate. The picture was generated with the Lanet-vi program of I. Alvarez-Hamelin et al. http://xavier.informatics.indiana.edu/lanet-vi.
2. The color code is the k-index of a node, which is the number of links a node has to other nodes in the center of the network. The size of a node is proportional to the total number of connections it has.
3. Data is transferred between nodes of the Internet, and not websites.
4. The authors of the paper are physicists and engineers at Bar-Ilan, Tel-Aviv and the Hebrew Universities in Israel.
"internet" and "web" are *not* synonymous- the Web is one of many services that run across the internet.
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulcan someone explain the scale? The numbers mean absolutely nothing. At least from a quality point of view or QOS. http://www.templatestaff.com
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulI taste the rainbow!
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfuluseless image!
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulThe image is pretty, yet completely useless since you didn't label a damn thing. Like Axes, or even scale. Nice job nutjob.
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulOMG, ITS A GIANT FLOATING ANTBALL
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpfulActually the image is not useless, as it is a graph which doesn't need axes (neighbours are what are important).
Read the comments for interpretation of the numbers
0 out of 0 people found this comment helpful