PARIS, 5 April 2007 — Want to know whether your Internet social network will survive or break up? Try mathematics. An algorithm developed by Tamas Vicsek of Budapest’s Eotvos University and colleagues aims at pinning down some of the mechanisms for social interaction in a complex, fast-moving world.
They trawled over two sets of data to explore how people link up. One was a collaborative network of more than 30,000 researchers connected to an archive at New York’s Cornell University; the other was the yearlong record of communications patterns of four million mobile phone users.
Put together, these figures provided an intriguing picture of relationship dynamics. The team found that small groups endure only if they have an unchanged core of members — in other words, a clique.
“A typically small and stationary community undergoes minor changes, but lives for a long time,” they report in today’s issue of Nature, the weekly British science journal. Among large groups, though, the opposite holds true — a large community breaks up quickly if it is stationary, but endures if it opens itself up to new members. One example of this successful, loose affiliation is a school or a company.
The figures bear out, mathematically, what we know instinctively.
