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Scant Evidence of Power Laws Found in Real-World Networks

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/scant-evi...-20180215/

EXCERPT: A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world — from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell — are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network.

Purely random networks do not obey power laws, so when the early proponents of the scale-free paradigm started seeing power laws in real-world networks in the late 1990s, they viewed them as evidence of a universal organizing principle underlying the formation of these diverse networks. The architecture of scale-freeness, researchers argued, could provide insight into fundamental questions such as how likely a virus is to cause an epidemic, or how easily hackers can disable a network.

Over the past two decades, an avalanche of papers has asserted the scale-freeness of hundreds of real-world networks. [...] But over the years, other researchers have questioned both the pervasiveness of scale-freeness and the extent to which the paradigm illuminates the structure of specific networks. Now, the new paper reports that few real-world networks show convincing evidence of scale-freeness....

MORE: https://www.quantamagazine.org/scant-evi...-20180215/
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