h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

FYI, M, The spirit of h2g2 is much more alive than that of similar-sounding projects like Everything2. Everything2 suffers from the smae hierarchical user system that was meant to give it order - and the lack of point to their Personal Spaces. There, it feels disconnected. Here you're important from the word go - you've been talking to some top community people - Feisor and Mina to name just two of them. (Sorry if I missed your name out, I had a bit of a memory block) Oh yeah, and OUZ - top quality Researcher. BTW, E2 just an example, I just happen to know of it! Also, the Towers dropped in on the Conversation, although not posting. They get *everywhere* you know! Happy h2g2-ing!

Whoami?

* Wonders if Whoami's comment is flattery or insult *

Flattery.

Well, this certainly has proved me wrong, hasn`t it? I am very glad to be here.

Actually, my comments on the guide not being able to expand for ever are from a purely mathematical point of view. Being a young, unemployed computer programmer, hit by the fact the no-one wants to hire anyone any more, I tend to over analyse.

The fact is that if the sites volume increases exponentially, server space aside, it is down to the level and type of indexing that you use that will indicate the efficiency, usability and future of the site.

There are two main types of index - clustered and non-clustered. A custered index physically rearranges the data into a defined order set by a given amount of variables or a pre-set data-type. On a large server operation, where data may be geographically dispersed this is possible but so tricky and difficult it defeats the point of indexing. The second type - non-clustered - gives a theoretical arrangement of the data above the core pages that actually conatin the data in binary. A set of data may contain an almost infinite amount of nc indexes but can only have one c index.

As in this case a continually updated c index would cause the site to crash you woud need to implement non-clustered indexing in terms of seraching. An index allows a generic setting up of an order in which data is seen to be stored - most examples may use the alaphabet, but this would reuire that data was unique. For instance imagine I wrote an article of 2000 words. A lot of these 2000 words would be common to a ot of articles. In fact, given that enough articles were written, it would be possible for another article to contain these exact 2000 words but be about something completely different. In effect, it would be an anagram of the original. So, it wouldn`t be enough to just index the words of each article - you must index the semantics as well - that is to say to use nc indexes too cross-reference words, sentences and articles to produce comprehensive analytical data, so as that you could find what was needed. Because although this is a community - it is a community with a mission, the point of what everyone does here is to write.

At some point, mathematically, unless you were to develop a new language - this wouldn`t be difficult, Tolkien anyone? - it will be impossible to find anything without some form of stricter editorial stance, which due to exponential growth, would be impossible.

This basically equates with the fact that if you were to give enough monkeys type-writers one of them would eventualy write the works of shakespeare, but in a far more mathematical sense.

If you were to come up with algorithms based on primes and the Mandelbrot set you could expand these semantically aware indexes to infinity but a machine that could do that would be larger that a machine that could store absolutely everything in existance. ie - the universe.

S, I hope that sort of explains something - if you have any questions please ask......


M

yes, what are you talking about?
I'm lost!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/U6
Jim Lynn is our computer whizz kid, he'd probably be quite interested in what you are saying. He can agree, or let you know why that (wahtever 'that' is) wouldn't happen.

Mina is not spelled wrong, may it should have been Mind(y)

Just on a little note - while the normal Guide may be expanding as you say - we can't prove it without the stats, which are confidential, the EG expands in a linear fashion - 30 a week, every week (ish).

Glad to see you've come to yer senses .

Whoami?

Since the growth of the human population is growing exponentially (ish - give or take a few deaths here and there) it would be possible, as long as we found room for them all. Seeing as the popular beleif is that the universe is infinite, there should be plenty of room somewhere.