Any two people, six handshakes apart

Stanley Milgram's 1967 experiment sent letters across the United States via personal contacts. The average chain was about six links long. In 1998 Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz showed that adding just a few random shortcuts to a regular network collapses the average path length to roughly log(N) while keeping local clustering high. Social networks, brains, power grids and the internet all live in this small-world regime.

N — number of nodes

k — neighbours per side (degree = 2k)

p — rewiring probability

0.10

Statistics

avg path length L: 2.752
clustering C: 0.478
L / L₀: 0.506
C / C₀: 0.744
max degree: 10

Find shortest path

Click any two nodes in the graph. BFS finds the shortest connecting path and highlights it in amber.

source: —
target: —
path length: —

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