Human navigation has been a topic of interest in spatial cognition from the past few decades. It has been experimentally observed that humans accomplish the task of way-finding a destination in an unknown environment by recognizing landmarks. Investigations using network analytic techniques reveal that humans, when asked to way-find their destination, learn the top ranked nodes of a network. In this paper we report a study simulating the strategy used by humans to recognize the centers of a network. We show that the paths obtained from our simulation has the same properties as the paths obtained in human based experiment. The simulation thus performed leads to a novel way of path-finding in a network. We discuss the performance of our method and compare it with the existing techniques to find a path between a pair of nodes in a network.
A detailed survey on decentralized search algorithms on networks that exhibit small-world phenomena is given by Kleinberg in @cite_21 . This survey also contains an exhaustive list of open problems in this area.
@cite_21
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The study of complex networks has emerged over the past several years as a theme spanning many disciplines, ranging from mathematics and computer science to the social and biological sciences. A significant amount of recent work in this area has focused on the development of random graph models that capture some of the qualitative properties observed in large-scale network data; such models have the potential to help us reason, at a general level, about the ways in which real-world networks are organized. We survey one particular line of network research, concerned with small-world phenomena and decentralized search algorithms, that illustrates this style of analysis. We begin by describing awell-known experiment that provided the first empirical basis for the �six degrees of separation� phenomenon in social networks; wethen discuss some probabilistic network models motivated by this work, illustrating how these models lead to novel algorithmic and graph-theoretic questions, and how they are supported by recent empirical studies of large social networks.