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Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations

The question of why and how animal and human groups form temporarily stable hierarchical organizations has long been a great challenge from the point of quantitative interpretations. The prevailing observation/consensus is that a hierarchical social or technological structure is optimal considering...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zamani, Maryam, Vicsek, Tamas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431112/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28469242
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01503-y
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author Zamani, Maryam
Vicsek, Tamas
author_facet Zamani, Maryam
Vicsek, Tamas
author_sort Zamani, Maryam
collection PubMed
description The question of why and how animal and human groups form temporarily stable hierarchical organizations has long been a great challenge from the point of quantitative interpretations. The prevailing observation/consensus is that a hierarchical social or technological structure is optimal considering a variety of aspects. Here we introduce a simple quantitative interpretation of this situation using a statistical mechanics-type approach. We look for the optimum of the efficiency function [Formula: see text] with J (ij) denoting the nature of the interaction between the units i and j and a (i) standing for the ability of member i to contribute to the efficiency of the system. Notably, this expression for E (eff) has a similar structure to that of the energy as defined for spin-glasses. Unconventionally, we assume that J (ij)-s can have the values 0 (no interaction), +1 and −1; furthermore, a direction is associated with each edge. The essential and novel feature of our approach is that instead of optimizing the state of the nodes of a pre-defined network, we search for extrema for given a (i)-s in the complex efficiency landscape by finding locally optimal network topologies for a given number of edges of the subgraphs considered.
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spelling pubmed-54311122017-05-16 Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations Zamani, Maryam Vicsek, Tamas Sci Rep Article The question of why and how animal and human groups form temporarily stable hierarchical organizations has long been a great challenge from the point of quantitative interpretations. The prevailing observation/consensus is that a hierarchical social or technological structure is optimal considering a variety of aspects. Here we introduce a simple quantitative interpretation of this situation using a statistical mechanics-type approach. We look for the optimum of the efficiency function [Formula: see text] with J (ij) denoting the nature of the interaction between the units i and j and a (i) standing for the ability of member i to contribute to the efficiency of the system. Notably, this expression for E (eff) has a similar structure to that of the energy as defined for spin-glasses. Unconventionally, we assume that J (ij)-s can have the values 0 (no interaction), +1 and −1; furthermore, a direction is associated with each edge. The essential and novel feature of our approach is that instead of optimizing the state of the nodes of a pre-defined network, we search for extrema for given a (i)-s in the complex efficiency landscape by finding locally optimal network topologies for a given number of edges of the subgraphs considered. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-05-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5431112/ /pubmed/28469242 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01503-y Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Zamani, Maryam
Vicsek, Tamas
Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title_full Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title_fullStr Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title_full_unstemmed Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title_short Glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
title_sort glassy nature of hierarchical organizations
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431112/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28469242
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01503-y
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