Maillart T, Sornette D, Spaeth S, von Krogh G
Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, CH-8001 Zurich, Switzerland.
Phys Rev Lett. 2008 Nov 21;101(21):218701. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.218701. Epub 2008 Nov 19.
Zipf's power law is a ubiquitous empirical regularity found in many systems, thought to result from proportional growth. Here, we establish empirically the usually assumed ingredients of stochastic growth models that have been previously conjectured to be at the origin of Zipf's law. We use exceptionally detailed data on the evolution of open source software projects in Linux distributions, which offer a remarkable example of a growing complex self-organizing adaptive system, exhibiting Zipf's law over four full decades.
齐普夫幂律是在许多系统中发现的一种普遍存在的经验规律，被认为是由比例增长导致的。在这里，我们通过实证确定了随机增长模型中通常假定的要素，这些要素此前被推测是齐普夫定律的起源。我们使用了关于Linux发行版中开源软件项目演变的极其详细的数据，这些项目提供了一个不断发展的复杂自组织自适应系统的显著例子，在整整四十年中都呈现出齐普夫定律。
