Political structures and the topology of simplicial complexes (Q2070572)

This is an interesting effort to represent political structures mathematically. A political structure is modeled as a finite set of agents, some subsets of which are ``viable configurations'' capable of cooperation. It is postulated that individual agents are viable as singletons, and that any subset of a viable configuration is viable. (The authors remark that the second postulate may not always be realistic.) Such a family of subsets is captured by the familiar concept of a simplicial complex. The authors consider various ways to measure the connectivity of the resulting complex, with emphasis on simplicial homology. The results are supposed to be significant in terms of the potential for mediation, etc, but I am afraid that this relevance is not obvious to me. The structures that homology distinguishes -- and the ones it considers as identical -- are not those that seem to me relevant here. Consider the following situations among five agents: (i) Only the pairs AB, BC,CD, DE, and EA can cooperate (\(C^5\)); (ii) Only the pairs AB, BC, CD, and DE can cooperate (\(P^4\)); (iii) ABCDE and any subsets can cooperate (the \(K^5\) multigraph). Politically, \(K^5\) is surely the most functional, with \(C^5\) (diameter 2) slightly better than \(P^4\) (diameter 3, one link away from a communication breakdown). Homology, however, treats \(P^4\) and \(K^5\) as identical, and sees only the ultimately meaningless ``hole'' in \(C^5\). The onus is on the authors to explain the relevance of this, and I cannot see that they have done so. The physicist Wigner has commented on the ``unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics''. This is often explained by the fact that the applications of mathematics that persist are the ones in which the structure of the mathematics fits that of the real world in some important way. I fear that this may not be among them.