Is the evolvability of complex information systems that this article speaks of related perhaps? (was shared on here a while ago as well)<p><a href="http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution" rel="nofollow">http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitabili...</a>
Interesting! Reading a bit more on the Wikipedia article, my understanding is that 'Universality' is an appropriate name because it describes classes of extremely diverse systems that can be described by the same abstract model—which also always happens to be a scale-invarient model that resembles a physical phase transition. Is that right, anybody? I thought this list of systems with the same 'universality class' was interesting (from the Wikipedia article[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance#Universality]" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance#Universality]</a>):<p>"Avalanches in piles of sand. The likelihood of an avalanche is in power-law proportion to the size of the avalanche, and avalanches are seen to occur at all size scales.
The frequency of network outages on the Internet, as a function of size and duration.
The frequency of citations of journal articles, considered in the network of all citations amongst all papers, as a function of the number of citations in a given paper.
The formation and propagation of cracks and tears in materials ranging from steel to rock to paper. The variations of the direction of the tear, or the roughness of a fractured surface, are in power-law proportion to the size scale.
The electrical breakdown of dielectrics, which resemble cracks and tears.
The percolation of fluids through disordered media, such as petroleum through fractured rock beds, or water through filter paper, such as in chromatography. Power-law scaling connects the rate of flow to the distribution of fractures.
The diffusion of molecules in solution, and the phenomenon of diffusion-limited aggregation.
The distribution of rocks of different sizes in an aggregate mixture that is being shaken (with gravity acting on the rocks)."
Loved the article, but wonder why this pattern, as ubiquitous as it may be, merits the name 'universality'. For all of the universally applicable laws in science, it feels like naming overreach to christen this particular result 'universality'.
This paper has 7 explicit examples of the universality phenomenon, including the bus scheduling.<p><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0603038" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0603038</a><p>It's moderately technical, but really interesting.
Interesting article, but this reminds me of the whole "power laws and long tails" that was big 10 years ago, or the perennial Golden Ratio. Seeing commonalities of pattern can be insightful to modeling a system, but ultimately promises that "it's all connected" are far overblown.