"Human Brain Cloud: a multiplayer word association game that started with a single word ("volcano") and has since taken on a life of its own. Players are given a word, which is culled from the database of previously entered words, and asked to enter the first thing that comes to mind. As people interact with the game it collects data about word associations that can be formed into a giant network (the cloud)."
"Researchers at the University of California recently conducted a study in which they found evidence to suggest that our brains catalog and rate the relevance of information by forming connections between data. The researchers compared the brain's system to Google's PageRank algorithm"Source
" The investigators found that a word’s “PageRank” was a good predictor of how often it would show up when people were asked to think of words that start with A, with B, and so on.
When it came predicting these results, “PageRank” beat two other seemingly reasonable ranking systems: tallies of how often words show up in ordinary writing; and a simple count of direct “links” to a word that doesn’t consider how many words, in turn, link to those linking words.
In the PageRank formula, a page gains “importance” based on how many other pages link to it. But links from pages that are themselves “important,” confer more importance than those that aren’t. Thus, importance can be thought of as flowing through the Web’s link network toward the most highly “linked-in” sites.
One explanation for the new findings, wrote Griffiths and colleagues, could be that connections among brain cells work similarly to Web links. Cells that are targets of many connections might become more active than others, in the same way that highly linked-in websites are deemed more important." Source
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment