disOrder

self-organizing maps

Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at Home is a screensaver that works in the background when a personal computer is "resting," analyzing data sent to it by the SETI project. The map above is repeatedly generated to show the current state of the analysis.

This is a self-organizing map; it redraws itself when the data changes.

Not only is this a much more sophisticated map that a simple hierarchy or distributed web, it also provides a new way of imagining hypertext as a self organizing map, a learning web.