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Re: Hypercube



At 05:15 7/16/00 -0600, Jim G wrote:
A young friend asks me the following:

My math teacher briefly discussed the Hypercube in class a few days ago.
...I have many questions ...

What is a "Hypercube" and what is its importance?

Jim Green

The hypercube's 15 minutes of fame arrived when 'connectionist'
computing theorists were exploring various ways of sharing a computing
task between numerous samples of what began as a device of limited power -
the microcomputer. People played with stars and rings which are towards
two ends of a spectrum of multiply connected devices and with various
configurations in between.

The cube allows paths along three edges or less, between any
two corners: 3/7 of the targets need just one hop.
Moreover, there is a certain amount of path redundancy (internet-style)
with this arrangement, as 'edges' are disabled.

The arrangement is generalised to more than eight nodes (corners or
computers) using the scaling rules for cubes in more than three dimensions.
So the slightly fanciful term for this style of network is a hypercube.

brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net> Altus OK
Eureka!