Regensburg 2002 – scientific programme

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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AKSOE 13: Soziale Systeme und Entscheidungsmodelle

AKSOE 13.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 12, 2002, 09:30–10:15, H8

Statistical Physics and Information Theory of a Connected World — •Yi-Cheng Zhang — Institut de Physique Theorique, Universite de Fribourg, CH - 1700 Fribourg

We discuss a new branch of information theory that exploits the implicit knowledge in a connected network where a large group of persons partially share and enhance each other knowledge. Implications for future generation of wireless communications, as well as the information structuresare presented. The starting point is to recognize that consumers’s tastes contain much information redundancy, in the sense of the Information Theory founded by Claude Shannon. We exploit the cross-correlation and formulate a matrix theory and set out to search for the probabilistic distribution. The general picture is that when the fraction of observed information versus that not yet observed exceeds a first threshold level, prediction is possible in the probabilistic sense: the larger the observed fraction the better is the prediction. This threshold level corresponds to a kind of percolation transition in matrix space. However, when the observed fraction is further increased, we reach the second threshold when prediction becomes certainty. Both analytic as well as numerical results are discussed, real world testing is under way.