Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies - the internet is a tree.

sunder sunder at sunder.net
Sat Apr 10 16:53:49 PDT 2004


Jim Dixon wrote:

> Yes.  I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of
> the Internet.  These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet
> I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees.

It is a tree. I'll give you a hint.  Think of this:

"God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and 
circumference nowhere."  Nicholas of Cusa.


It is a tree, but to see it, you'll need to find the root.  The quote above 
is a hint to where the root is.  Replace god with internet, sphere with 
tree, infinite with 2**32 (at least until it goes to ip6.)

So where's the root?  Scroll down for the answer.

  |
  |
  |
\ /
  V

























Did you see it?  No??? It's actually right infront of you.


Still don't know?  Ok then, keep scrolling down.































The root of the internet is your own internet connection.  Proof: If you 
were to iterate traceroutes over the entire ip4 space (good luck doing that 
by the way), and graph the results, you'd get a tree.  It's root is your 
default gateway.

:)





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