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Abhijit Mahabal
Most people in American movies have a number 4 or less. Given that there are about 225000 such people, this is remarkable. Why?? What makes this happen?
Six Degrees
Mails (Milgram, 60s) The Weak Version:
There exists a short path from anybody to anybody else
Why Bother?
In many of our earlier discussions, we have talked about how space was considered or ignored (in spread of wealth, language etc). Spatial interactions are more like those in a small world, rather than on a 2 D grid. The small world graphs are a lot more complicated, and cannot be embedded in a small dimensional space. Kareiva (90) has studied spread of disease. Kretzschamer & Morris studied the spread of disease as a function of the network structure Nowak & May (94, etc) have studied the evolution of prisoners-dilemma strategies over various networks
If r is 0, the neighbor is chosen randomly, and the world is like the solarium world. If r is very high, you only know your immediate neighbors: and the world is like the caveman world. For intermediate values, we get more and more smallworld-like behavior. There is always a findable path whose length is not too big (log square (size of the world)) only when
R is 2!!
For any other R (smaller or bigger than 2), the expected length of a findable path is a polynomial in n.