Diffusion limited friendship network: A model for six degrees of separation

Abstract

A dynamic model of a society is studied where each person is an uncorrelated and non-interacting random walker. A dynamical random graph represents the acquaintance network of the society whose nodes are the individuals and links are the pairs of mutual friendships. This network exhibits a novel percolation like phase transition in all dimensions. On introducing simultaneous death and birth rates in the population we show that the friendship network shows the six degrees of separation for ever after where the precise value of the network diameter depends on the death/birth rate. A SIS type model of disease spreading shows that this society remains always healthy if the population density is less than certain threshold value.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure