Exercises and Assignments
Before 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, add two long-range friendships and count again, then ask whether one person’s friends know each other — and finish on the question Milgram’s letters actually tested. 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 the notebook has one more thing for you: it makes your own code certify a town with no shortcuts at all as a strong small world, asks you to show why as a formula in n, and then asks you to build a test that does not fall for it.
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
Groups of up to three. One repository per group, graded once, with the same score going to every member of the group. Read how a mini-project runs first — exactly one person accepts the assignment and invites the rest, and that is the step teams get wrong.
- Repository for M02:
adv-net-sci-mini-proj-small-world. Accept the invitation through Classroom 50 first — the repository is not public, so the link only opens once you are enrolled.
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.