THIS MAN WANTS TO CONTROL THE INTERNET

摘要

John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more peoplernwill gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved. He and his colleagues have created a theory that has revealed some simple yet powerful ways to accelerate the flow of information. Vastly accelerate the flow: Doyle and his colleagues can now blast the entire text of all the books in the library of Congress across the United States in 15 minutes.rnI travel to Pasadena to learn about Doyle's work and am a bit flummoxed by his suggestion to meet not in his lab but in his gym. Doyle gets on a treadmill and begins to pound away. I turn on my machine and try to keep up. At 53, Doyle is long, lean, and hawk-faced. He is a championship athlete, and he works out furiously twice a day at least. It's hard for me to catch enough air to ask Doyle questions, but he has no problem holding forth in response. As he talks I begin to realize his secret agenda in meeting me here. A treadmill is the perfect place to start to understand his ideas, because for Doyle, the world is filled with complex networks—and a body in the middle of a workout is a very good example of what those networks are all about.