Power law, is it a fundamental law of cultural organization? Comment on 'Modelling language evolution: Examples and predictions' by Tao Gong, Lan Shuai, Menghan Zhang

摘要

In the target article [1] T. Gong and co-authors have noticed that a successful evolution of languages requires a condition of power-law distribution of agent's popularity or influence in a society (the probability for an agent of rank r to communicate with other agents is proportional to r~(-λ)). It might be more accurate to call the power law a self-organizing property. Possibly every successfully emerging and growing system exhibits power law. For example, connectivity of WWW sites follows power law [2] (power law is equivalent to a scale free property: at every scale the same pattern of connectivity is reproduced). I would emphasize that WWW emerged in recent decades, it grows fast, and its power-law property is self-organized.