16. Fitness
We’re doing a series on the book “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
WARNING: If you want to comment on any of these articles, please read the previous articles to understand the foundation.
The previous article covered Dr. Barabasi’s discovery leading to the book Linked.
Real world Networks are governed by 2 laws: Growth and Preferential Attachment
-Growth: Nodes are continually being added to real world Networks
-Preferential Attachment: in real world Networks, Nodes prefer to Link to Nodes that have more Links
Here’s a summary of the last 4 articles from Dr. Barabasi:
“The rich-get-richer phenomenon naturally leads to the power laws observed in real networks.”
Specifically:
“The expansion of the network means that the early nodes have more time than the latecomers to acquire links: If a node is the last to arrive, no other node has the opportunity to link to it; if a node is the first in the network, all subsequent nodes have a chance to link to it. Thus growth offers a clear advantage to the senior nodes, making them the richest in links. Seniority, however, is not sufficient to explain power laws. Hubs require the help of the second law, preferential attachment.”
Seniority doesn’t guarantee becoming a Hub in a Random Network. Notice, this means Hubs form MORE from popularity than any intrinsic value they offer
Dr. Barabasi’s final discovery answers the question: How do late-comers to the Network overtake Hubs to become the new Hub?
“If we wanted to account for the fierce competition witnessed in most networks, we had to acknowledge that each node is different.”
“In a competitive environment each node has a certain fitness. Fitness is your ability to make friends relative to everybody else in your neighborhood…”
Fitness: ability to make friends?
This isn’t a definition; it’s a measure of an effect. Why didn’t Dr. Barabasi give a definition?
“Fitness, however, remains a somewhat elusive quantity, since the tools to precisely measure the fitness of an individual node are still being developed.”
Preferential Attachment: the product of the Node’s Fitness and number of Links it has
This discovery was sparked by a story of Einstein’s ability to see value in a manuscript from an unknown Indian physicist that had been recently rejected by the Philosophical Magazine of the Royal Society in London. From Dr. Barabasi:
“In June 1924 Einstein received a letter and a brief manuscript written in English, from an unknown Indian physicist from Dacca named Satyendranath Bose. Unknown to Einstein, the manuscript had been recently rejected by the Philosophical Magazine of the Royal Society in London.”
Did you notice the problem that affects all of us when it comes to Networks that we rely on for information, governance, the economy, spiritual guidance, personal development, etc?
Like scientists with peer review (see graphic), we prefer Hubs (red Node) who use us because we don’t understand Fitness (green Nodes).
I will spend Section 3 proving this and cover the implications to all of us.
Next Article: 17. Directed Links