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.