Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics

280 7 Thermodynamical and Nonthermodynamical ApplicationsFig. 7.81 Segmentation using the entropic functional S q . Influence of the index q in natural images.Further details in [755].7.4.4 PING Internet ExperimentPING is a quick internet procedure which enables, from a given computer, to checkwhether any other specific computer is on-line at that moment. There is naturallya time delay (sparseness time interval) before the answer arrives. Abe and Suzuki[773] devised an interesting experiment which consisted in automatically repeatingthe ping instruction many times in order to measure the distribution of the sparsenesstime interval. The results can be seen in Figs. 7.86 and 7.87. They are relatively wellfitted by the expression P(> τ) = e −τ/τ 0q . If we plot the four pairs (q, ln τ 0 ), it doesnot suggest a monotonic curve, but rather something which could be closer to a