Chapter 1. Clustering Fundamentals

Clustering Fundamentals

Ask anyone on the street, and they'll tend to agree with you. Bigger is better. Get more bang for the buck. He who dies with the most toys wins. It stands to reason that, in most cases, more is better than only one. If one is good, two must be great.

It comes as no surprise, then, that computing has followed this trend from its infancy. Why even the ENIAC, widely regarded as the world’s first computer, didn’t have just a few parts. It had 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors (http://ftp.arl.army.mil/∼mphist/eniac-story.html). Why did the founders use ...

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