If a Network Is Broken, Break It More 124
New submitter Aras Esor writes "When a network is broken — an electrical grid, the World Wide Web, your neurological system — one math model created by a PhD student at Northwestern University suggests that the best way to fix it may be to break it a little more. 'Take the web of interactions within a cell. If you knock out an important gene, you will significantly damage the cell's growth rate. However, it is possible to repair this damage not by replacing the lost gene, which is a very challenging task, but by removing additional genes. The key lies in finding the specific changes that would bring a network from the undesirable state A to the preferred state B. Cornelius's mathematical model (abstract) provides a general method to pinpoint those changes in any network, from the metabolism of a single cell to an entire food web.'"
Re:Paradox? (Score:4, Informative)
(Are those genes selfish? Because if so, this) may be a classic case of resolving a Braess's paradox [wikipedia.org] by removing a trigger for selfish behaviour.
It has to do with non-linear systems that have many points of equilibrium (Braess's paradox involves another example of the same, except the equilibrium is considered in the Nash sense).
A quotation from the arxiv paper [arxiv.org] that says what's all about:
For example, a damaged power grid undergoing a large blackout may still have other stable states in which no blackout would occur, but the perturbed system may not be able to reach those states spontaneously. We suggest that many large-scale failures are determined by the convergence of the network to a “bad” state rather than by the unavailability of “good” states.
Re:The TITANIC's weight distribution, a network? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, deliberate flooding was recognised at the time as a solution for accidental flooding problems.
Taking the famous Andrea Doria collision with the Stockholm, there was an attempt to flood empty tanks on the former in order to right the list caused by flooding that followed from severe collision damage. To no avail, however.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Andrea_Doria#Assessing_damage_and_imminent_danger [wikipedia.org]