How to get rid of the magic curse of Dayton

Get rid of the magic Curse of the Dayton number

Social interaction is one of the most basic needs of human beings. But, naturally to our human brain, only let us maintain 150-200 or so friends. Beyond this range, there will be friends slowly forgotten. The average size of many social groups is 150, which is also known as the Dunbar number [1]. For example, around 6000 BC, the number of Neolithic villages in the Middle East was between 120-150 people. In the Roman Republic, the Roman army had a basic combat unit of about 130. Since the 1950s, sociologists have learned that companies between 150-200 people can operate on the basis of interpersonal relationships, and once they are over, they need various hierarchies and management structures [2].

Before modern times, most people lived in a fixed circle between 150-200 people. People in the circle have good relationships, but few people outside the circle. As a result, they can manage social relationships in the whole community with their brains alone. Of course, there is a difference in the 150. One of the most intimate, about 3-5 people, consists of a very small core circle. Second is a slightly larger circle, about 30-50 people [2]. The whole circle again.

But the mobility of modern society has changed all this. As we grow, we migrate from one place to another, from one circle to another. For most people, we are born and raised in one place, go to a new place to study and meet new friends. After graduation, we go to a new place to work, meet new colleagues ... At every stage, we will have friends and close friends. But as the migration, old friends slowly forgotten. Dunbar and others point out that every year we forget about 15% of our best friends, and our old friends will slowly retreat from the center of our social circle to the edge of the circle, or even eventually disappear [1].

Forgetting old friends is not the only problem. When we go to a new place, we need to meet new friends, into the new environment, this process has become a little difficult. Although we have a variety of technical means, but face-to-face communication and communication is still the main means to meet friends. According to the study, we spend 40% of our daily time dealing with only 5 people. And these 5 are often our close friends [1]. In this fast-paced era, face-to-face communication is clearly inefficient for making friends quickly.

We look forward to "meeting new friends and not forgetting old friends". But in fact, we are in a "difficult to make new friends, forget old friends" embarrassing situation. Now social networking sites and software are trying to help us change this embarrassing situation. Through social networks, we can add quite a few friends, hundreds of or even thousands of. This seems to solve our problem, but it's just a superficial phenomenon: in fact, we still can't control it. In a mature social network, the average number of friends is only 120-130. When the number of friends is more than 150-200, some friends can hardly recognize [1]. This is a funny, but it has to be accepted fact: social networks did evolve into the 21st century, but our brains are no better than they were thousands years ago. It looks like the number of miles is a curse. Although we have made a lot of effort, we still can't get rid of it.

But why don't we directly list our life circles (including past, current, and incoming) directly on social networks? In that case, we can manage and identify good friends that we have accumulated over the years, some may have forgotten, but when we put them back in their circle, The forgotten names will be clear again; we can also use the power of the human pulse of the circle to find friends who have been separated for years, and we can share the present story with our old playmates, and they must be very eager to know our situation; When we enter a new environment, we just need to add a few QQ friends, The circle will be able to show us more potential friends, help us quickly into the new environment ... Yes, why not?

QQ Circle, so born.

Distance from idea to realization

Concept to the realization of the distance, is a suitable technical solution. QQ Circle of calculation is very simple: the first step, to find a possible circle of friends, the second step, the circle.

It is relatively simple to look for a possible circle of friends. As we all know, QQ uses the account number is QQ. It's the QQ number that naturally becomes a barrier to finding friends--because we don't know what their QQ number is. However, we believe that if they have QQ number, someone will always know. And these people, they're hiding in our buddy list. In other words, those long-lost friends are likely to be hidden among our best friends (hereafter known as potential friends). After a long period of data analysis and evaluation, we finally made a simple and effective setting, which is to limit our circle of friends and close to our relationship with potential friends. Based on this list of friends, we have designed a rigorous cleaning, filtering and filtering algorithm. The purpose of designing these cleaning, filtering and filtering algorithms is to protect privacy and to improve the accuracy of the push.

Lap is the most important and difficult step. In real social networks, people in the same circle are familiar with each other, but there is little friendship between people in different circles. Map to the QQ account system, which is equivalent to the same circle of people to each other as friends, and different circles of people are "strangers". This experience derived from real life is the basic assumption of our whole loop algorithm.

In fact, the loop algorithm based on this hypothesis is not uncommon. Academia has studied the Newman algorithm of social networks, among which more popular is the loop algorithm proposed by people such as the "3, 4." We also tried in the early Newman and other methods, but found that this algorithm compared to the cost of computing power, and the effect of the difference is far from our requirements. We also tried some other methods in the literature, such as a random diffusion algorithm such as Raghavan [5]. Raghavan and other people's algorithm greatly reduced the amount of computation, unfortunately, the effect of the separation is still not up to our requirements. The circles we want to show are better and more accurate.

Finally we decided to develop our own set of algorithms. After a long period of trial and experiment, we designed a "find friends" algorithm. As with the existing social network loop algorithm, the "Find Friends" algorithm only uses the QQ number is a friend between the simplest and direct data. The calculation of this algorithm is relatively simple, and the effect is better than all the methods we have tried. In the algorithm, every circle is getting better by finding friends. The "good" standard here is to keep friends in the circle as close as possible, while friends outside the circle are as far as possible.

In order to be able to better identify the circle and circle of friends, we also designed a special algorithm to try to provide the circle and circle friend reference name. In the process of algorithmic design, we spend a considerable amount of time and effort to protect privacy. For example, in a circle, only a majority of the circle members use the exact same memo name for a circle member, and the note name is aggregated. And the note name is only shown to the core members of the circle. All the names are also filtered by very strict and comprehensive dirty words, sensitive words, etc. In addition, we also based on the theory of small-world networks [6, 7] Carefully designed the sort of circle of friends. We also made smart notes such a function, if you like, you can quickly copy the comments on the circle to QQ friends List ...

A New Beginning

All we do is to help our limited brain cope with the changing social environment. QQ Circle will be an intelligent platform. This platform can help us do a lot of trivial, sometimes difficult things: such as grouping, notes, looking for friends. This platform can integrate friend's communication way, also can integrate the friend's news dynamics, saves us to search and browse everywhere the energy. This platform can help us maintain our existing relationships, regain our lost friends, and help us explore more friends and expand our social networks. This platform can help us to revitalize our social capital, for our life to bring more wonderful!

QQ Circle, will be a new beginning!

References:

1. Dunbar,r., you ' ve Got to Have friends.the New York times, the Opinion Pages, 2010.

2. Dunbar,r., how Many Friends does one person Need?:D Unbar ' s number and other evolutionary Quirks. 2010:harvard Univ Pr.

3. Newman,m.e.j., modularity and Communitystructure in NX. Proceedings of the national Academy of sciences,2006. (a): P. 8577.

4. Newman,m.e.j. and M. Girvan, finding andevaluating community businessesflat-out in NX. Physical Review E, 2004. (2): P. 026113.

5. RAGHAVAN,U.N, R. Albert, and S. Kumara, Nearlinear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale NX. Physical Review E, 2007. 3: p.036106.

6. Adamic,l., the Sgt World Web. Andadvanced Marvell for Digital libraries, 1999:p. 852-852.

7. Collins,j.j. and C.C Chow, it's a Sgt world. Nature, 1998. 393 (6684): P. 409-410.