Sunday, November 19, 2006

Cost of living

There's no such thing as free lunch. Most of us almost agree with it without even arguing about it. Result: Though we agree with it we don't like it. But I try to present somethings that might actually help in liking it not just agreeing with it. The axioms of human survival (like everyone wants to be peaceful, survive, be clear etc.) are of course assumed for this post as is with every other post on this blog.

There are different kinds of struggles based on the kind of society one lives in. The chief characteristic of a society that determines the kind is its interdependency structure. The more transparent the structure is, the less appealing is the saying. Hence the goal becomes to realize the structure. This requires mastery of your emotions and logic which you get by mental maturity. I will present some ideas about how to try to realize the structure.

The structure you are trying to realize is interdependency structure. Results in graph theory can be very useful. Consider humans as nodes in a huge human graph. There is an edge between two nodes if there is an interdependency between the two humans. Each edge has cost for its existence and maintenance. The total cost of all edges connecting a group of people decides the average cost of living for the group. Humans always try to optimize the resources they have to maintain the edges. The actual algorithms like finding minimum spanning trees, or shortest paths among nodes are in P. But more serious issue is that the graph is not revealed all at once. The graph is slowly built and a current model of computation namely streaming model comes to rescue. I am not aware with many results of streaming model in graph theory but research in this direction is very promising.