https://ncase.me/crowds/

https://www.nature.com/articles/30918

The idea of the "small world" was popularized by Travers & Milgram's 1969 experiment, which showed that, on average, any two random people in the United States were just six friendships apart — "six degrees of separation"!

The small-world network got more mathematical meat on its bones with “Collective dynamics of small-world networks” by Watts & Strogatz (1998), which proposed an algorithm for creating networks with both low average path length (low degree of separation) and high clustering (friends have lots of mutual friends) — that is, a network that hits the sweet spot!

You can also play with the visual, interactive adaptation of that paper by Bret Victor (2011).

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