Theoretical Physics Colloquium
Networks of agents having a degree preference
by Prof. Deepak Dhar (TIFR)
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
from
to
(Asia/Kolkata)
at AG69
at AG69
Description |
I will discuss a model of social network of agents in which individuals can add or delete links connecting them to others, making the network evolve in time. Each agent is typically comfortable with a certain number of contacts, i.e., they have preferred degree, and add links if they have too few, or delete if they have too many. It is difficult to determine the steady state of such networks in general. A particular simplifying limit is interesting to study: It is in which members are either extreme introverts, who do not want any links, or extreme extroverts who want as many as possible. Remarkably, in this case, the exact probability distribution of different network configurations in the steady state can be found, and has an interesting analytical form. Further, the network exhibits a phase transition in which the fractional number of links in the system jumps discontinuously from a value near zero, to near 1, as we vary a parameter. I will also discuss variants of the model where the agents also have a preference about which links to add or remove, and these variations show qualitatively new features. |