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Quantum systems could improve web searches

by on06 April 2009

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All to do with cats who may or may not be alive


Boffins fiddling
around with a mathematical technique that looks at disorder in quantum systems could improve internet keyword searches.

Spanish boffins claim the formula can spot significant patterns in large data sets such as web pages and text documents, and may even be adaptable to genome analysis. We guess this is if the cat is dead or alive when you open the box. Search engines compare word frequencies in one document with the frequencies in a standard corpus of text from many sources. If a word in the document occurs more frequently than average, it is considered important.

However the algorithmgauges the importance of words in a document based on where they appear, rather than simply on how often they occur. Pedro Carpena, a physicist at the University of Malaga in Spain developed a technique from random matrix theory to analyse quantum systems. He said that important words tend to be clustered together and less important ones appear at random and never get invited to important words' parties or get picked for word games.

Using random matrix theory he extracted keywords from a book by Albert Einstein called Relativity: The special and general theory, he found "universe", "field", "gravitational", and "energy" among the top 10 results.
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