On Aug 10, 5:32 pm, Mike Ward <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Doug Elrod <[email protected]> wrote: > > Given the many ways that people have connected with the show (or > > people connected with the show, or people connected with *them*, etc.) > > we probably ought to modify the classic Baconian rules so that > > multiple parallel links result in a lower number (rather than just > > finding the minimum-link path to WNN). > > OK, Doug's appointed head mathematician/statistician for this project! > Let's polka!
I'm thinking that there's an analogy with electrical circuits. If you put resistors in series, the total resistance adds, just like Bacon numbers. (And you could tweak things to have some links be "closer" than others by having the additive increment be less than one, for instance.) The formula for the total resistance of resistors in a *parallel* circuit may be in line with the kind of function we need (having many links to WNN ought to *lower* your number): R_total = 1/(1/R_1 + 1/R_2) If we adopt that technique for people with multiple links to WNN, someone connected via a WNN-Number=3 and a separate, independent WNN- Number=7 would have a net number of 1/(1/3+1/7) = 2.1 -Doug Elrod ([email protected]) P.S. Hey, they've brought back the "More insomniacs" audio bumper! Did the ratings improve recently? ;-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "World News Now Discussion List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wnndl?hl=en.
