Tuesday, May 27, 2014

This post covers some more interesting trivia about graph theory.
A graph diameter is the longest shortest path between any two graph vertices.
If we take a connected graph or network with a high graph diameter  and we add a very small number of edges randomly, the diameter tends to drop drastically. This is known as the small world phenomenon. It is also referred to as the six degrees of separation since any person in a social network of the world turns out to be linked to any other person by roughly six connections.
An acyclic digraph is a directed graph containing no directed cycles, also known as a  directed acyclic graph or a DAG. The number of DAGs on n = 1, 2, 3... vertices are 1, 2, 6, 31, ...
In the use of DAGs for communication networks, we frequently encounter problems of information dissemination described for a group of individuals. Gossiping and broadcasting are two such common problems. In gossiping, every person in the network knows a unique item of information and needs to communicate it to everyone else. In broadcasting, one individual has an item of information which needs to be communicated to everyone else.
To illustrate gossiping consider that there are n people each of whom know a specific scandal that's not known to others. They communicate by telephone and whenever two people place a call, they pass on as many scandals as they know. The question is how many calls are needed  before everyone gets to know every scandal. We could try this with a value of n = 4 where the participants are labeled A, B, C and D. Then the scandals could spread in this manner {A,B}, {C, D}, {A, C}, {B, D}. The n = 4 solution can then be generalized by adding another player X to the beginning and end of the previous solution thus resulting in {A,E} {A,B}, ... {B,D} {A,E }
We thus see that gossiping takes incremental numbers of calls between participants. Gossiping is also called total exchange and all to all communication. It has applications in communications and distributed systems. For example, a large class of parallel computing problems are addressed with gossiping including Fourier transforms and sorting. If f(n) denotes a function for the number of minimum calls necessary to complete gossiping among n people and where any pair of people can call each other, we see that for
n = 1, f(n) = 0
n = 2, f(n) = 1
n = 3, f(n) = 3
n = 4, f(n) = 4
n = 5, f(n) = 6
and in general f(n) = 2n - 4 for n >= 4
For one way communication where the graph is considered a DAG, the minimum number of calls = f(n) = 2n - 2 for n >= 4

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