Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine

There’s actually a lot of goldmines out there in the outer reaches of our computer system.  None of us have been to all of them, but we’ve all been to some of them.  I don’t know where exactly this one is, but you can find all the scenes from it here.

This is what’s written at the entrance to the mine:

A gallery of large graphs

graph drawing of matrices in the University of Florida Collection

Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection using sfdp algorithm . The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 2328 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (a rectangular matrix is treated as a bipartite graph) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm. If the graph is disconnected, then the largest connected component is drawn. The largest graph (Schenk@nlpkkt240) has 27,993,600 vertices and 366,327,376 edges. A simple coloring scheme is used: longer edges are colored with colder colors, and short ones warmer. The graphs are in alphabetical order. Use the “Search” link to find graphs of specific characters.

from: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index1.html

The computer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

What page in a mathbook ever looked like this?

I should have been a bag of glowing mesh, gliding across the floors of silent seas

I argued with infinity. I wish I hadn't.

I just like it

Somewhere, this was the topic of an advanced technical discussion

It looks like this

And this too

Why? Why did it do that?

you don't know what you're digging, until it's been dug

1. I got a handle on it 2. I had a handle on it 3. What's a handle?

The machine is humble and efficient. It would draw another picture before it would ever sign its name.

Another picture

This could be a sub-atomic energy cloud, or a map of the universe

It all makes sense, the longer you stare at it

We know art doesn't have to be useful, but do we also know that art doesn't have to be useless?

It's perfect. What does perfect mean?

The elegant effervescence of electricity

It pretends to be a car, and slips away unseen

Can a prison cell be a work of art?

So little, so much

Thanks to but does it float for helping me find the Goldmine.

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3 thoughts on “Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine

  1. large graph are a wonderfull topic. :)
    I have a ~1 billions node graph to visualize, still don’t know how i’ll do that :(

  2. A Very Nice find !!! :-)
    But very time consuming to view those 2,328 graphs, especially if one followed the links to the details behind each matrix. (Some of them had more graphs for a single image link.)

    “Can you picture what will be
    So limitless and free
    Desperately in need…”

    “This is the end
    Beautiful friend
    This is the end”

  3. that’s funny, I was also reminded of the Doors when I saw the graphs. perhaps due to the conditioning from the title. great find indeed, thanks for sharing!

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