Exercises and Assignments
In the Lecture: Discover It Yourself
You work this in class, before any of it is named — it is designed so that you discover the concepts yourself, with nothing but a pencil.
- Six Handshakes to a Stranger: sixteen people sitting in a circle. You count how many handshakes it takes to get a letter across the town, decide which of the average and the worst case you would put in a headline and which on a postbox, add two long-range friendships and count again, ask whether one person’s friends know each other — and finish by multiplying 150 friends out to eight billion people and working out what clustering does to that answer. Worked answers, for after you have tried it.
- It’s a small world!! 6 degrees of separation (Moro 2017)
After the Lecture: Break It
The last part of the sheet hands you off to a notebook, done alone with the sheet beside you. It builds the same town out of three rules you write, checks your pencilled numbers against its own, and then turns the rewiring dial that pencil and paper cannot — the famous clustering-and-distance curve comes out of your own two functions.
- The M02 lab notebook — or point a camera at the square on the last page of the sheet.
Finish early and stop there. The notebook used to end with a town that has no shortcuts at all being certified a strong small world; that is now the mini-project, and it is better done in a group than alone.
Assignments
Pair Notebook
Work through this module with the AI tutor and hand in the notebook that the session builds. What is graded is your reasoning, not your code — see the Pair Notebook guide for the setup and a walkthrough of a full session.
- Repository for M02:
advnetsci-pair-notebook-m02-small-world. Accept the invitation through Classroom 50; the repository is private to the class.
Group Mini-Project
How small is a small world? Groups of up to three, ninety minutes in class, three minutes to present. There is no Classroom assignment and no repository waiting for you this time: the whole thing is one page of questions, and most of the answers are worked out on paper.
You derive C and L for a random network and for a ring, predict what the small-world index does to the ring as it grows, check the prediction, and then argue about what the index is actually measuring. That argument is the point of the session.
- The task sheet — read it before the session.
You hand in a short write-up, text and figures, in a public GitHub repository of your own, and submit the link. Any format except Word. The sheet ends with a block of instructions you can hand to a coding agent, which will build the repository and give you the link; you press the submit button yourself.
Readers who are not enrolled in SSIE 641 cannot open the assignment repositories. The worksheet above and the hands-on notebook cover the same material and need no enrollment.