You can have your hyperlink patent, BT. It’s old news. A new Web server called Principia Cybernetica builds its own links wherever it thinks you might want them - and closes down the ones that you don’t use. Gotta patent for that? Didn’t think so.The Principia Cybernetica Web Server’s trick is that it continually rebuilds the links between its pages to adapt them to users’ needs. Whereas in a conventional Web site, the hyperlinks are fixed, this one puts a new link wherever it thinks they’ll open up a path that surfers are likely to use. Add to that an ability to close down old links that fall into disuse, and the result is a dynamic system of strengthening and weakening links between different pages that is not unlike aspects of neural network systems and…(whisper it)... the BRAIN itself. The Web server works on a simple mechanism, identifying individual users through cookies and keeping records of their routes through the site. The server adjusts the structure of its links to best suit you and creates new links using a process called ‘transivity’. It infers semantic links between documents by interpreting the movements of users and then hardwires those links into its documents. Johan Bollen, inventor of the server, is convinced he’s sewn the seeds for a giant online megabrain. Where, in the human brain, if one neuron is activated shortly after another neuron, the synapse connecting the two gets stronger, in Principia Cybernetica, links are reinforced by popularity - while rarely used links will diminish and die. Transivity, Bollen reckons, could lead to continuous reorganising of the Web, making it ever more efficient. Eventually, he argues, the Web will know you so well that your requests to its search engines will turn up exactly what you need, every time. ‘Whatever problem people have, any kind of question to which they want an answer, it will all become easier because the Web will self-organise and adapt to what people expect of it,’ he says. And that, some would reply, is some spooky Solaris-type shit.