Braha Dan, Bar-Yam Yaneer
Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 Jan;69(1 Pt 2):016113. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.69.016113. Epub 2004 Jan 28.
The last few years have led to a series of discoveries that uncovered statistical properties that are common to a variety of diverse real-world social, information, biological, and technological networks. The goal of the present paper is to investigate the statistical properties of networks of people engaged in distributed problem solving and discuss their significance. We show that problem-solving networks have properties (sparseness, small world, scaling regimes) that are like those displayed by information, biological, and technological networks. More importantly, we demonstrate a previously unreported difference between the distribution of incoming and outgoing links of directed networks. Specifically, the incoming link distributions have sharp cutoffs that are substantially lower than those of the outgoing link distributions (sometimes the outgoing cutoffs are not even present). This asymmetry can be explained by considering the dynamical interactions that take place in distributed problem solving and may be related to differences between each actor's capacity to process information provided by others and the actor's capacity to transmit information over the network. We conjecture that the asymmetric link distribution is likely to hold for other human or nonhuman directed networks when nodes represent information processing and using elements.
在过去几年里，人们有了一系列发现，揭示了各种不同的现实世界社会、信息、生物和技术网络共有的统计特性。本文的目的是研究参与分布式问题解决的人员网络的统计特性，并讨论其重要性。我们表明，问题解决网络具有一些特性（稀疏性、小世界特性、标度律），这些特性与信息、生物和技术网络所展现的特性相似。更重要的是，我们展示了有向网络入度和出度分布之间一个此前未被报道的差异。具体而言，入度分布有明显的截止值，该截止值远低于出度分布的截止值（有时出度截止值甚至不存在）。这种不对称性可以通过考虑分布式问题解决过程中发生的动态交互来解释，并且可能与每个参与者处理他人提供信息的能力和参与者通过网络传输信息的能力之间的差异有关。我们推测，当节点代表信息处理和使用元素时，这种不对称的链路分布可能适用于其他人类或非人类的有向网络。
