24 of 30 - Meme Review

[aggienaut]

   Theres a "meme" floating around that tells one what lj "cliques" they're in; basically which groups on their friends list all have eachother listed as friends. The idea is interesting, but its written rather badly in certain ways.
   Most suprisingly, instead of using the familiar [lj user=emosnail] type coding, it uses the much longer route of linking to the images livejournal uses for the same purpose and linking to the info page and livejournal.

   The most critical problem in the function of the meme is that if in a large group of people two happen not to link to eachother as friends, it creates two completely seperate "cliques." For example here is what it tells me:

I am a member of 3 cliques of size 7

• emosnail, basicallyasap, slosha, nessabfly, badbree, ilivewith8boobs, colleeniebeenie


• emosnail, basicallyasap, nessabfly, badbree, ilivewith8boobs, colleeniebeenie, pavelthegeek


• emosnail, citizene, simplistic_me, suziej, jegskaltisse, sandwiches, soccermomxcore

Find the largest clique containing:

(Enter your livejournal username here).

   What this actually means is that I'm part of a group consisting of emosnail, basicallyasap, nessabfly, badbree, ilivewith8boobs, and colleeniebeenie, with pavelthegeek, and slosha as slightly less connected members (they're only not connected to eachother actually)(this is basically the group of people I've met through Kristy). I am also apparently a part of a group of UC Davis hardcore kids consisting of emosnail, citizene, simplistic_me, suziej, jegskaltisse, sandwiches, and soccermomxcore.
   I'd imagine I'm part of other smaller interconnected groups, but the thing only displays these three. If anyone knows of a similar meme that does all this better I'd be interested in hearing about it.


Picture of the Day

View down Preciados towards El Cortijo (my street)
Mission Viejo, CA
© Kris Fricke 2004


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Comments

[emd.livejournal.com]

yeah that thing was really confusing. & now, since you explained it, it is even more so. thanks.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

"clique" is a well-defined technical term in graph theory.

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

no kidding? does the meme use it correctly?

[nibot.livejournal.com]

yes, a clique is a well-connected subgraph --- where a graph is a connection of "verticies" (in this case lj-users) connected by "edges" (in this case, the friend-of relationship), and a "well-connected" graph is one where every vertex has an edge connecting it to every other vertex. Finding an "approximate" clique would be very interesting, but I think much more difficult from a computational perspective. The 'meme' was started by my friend hukuma, a graduate student in computer science at Berkeley, and I assumed that's how you found it.

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

I got it from forrest441 on my friends list.

[rote.livejournal.com]

I am a member of 10 cliques of size 6

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

What that probably means, and looking at yours briefly it looks to be the case, is that all those cliques are one person different and if you just figure out the five people who are in each one, that'll give you a more understandable result of whats going on.