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.
, in @cite_13 addresses the question of how participants in a small world experiment are able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about their immediate contacts. They conduct their experiment on an email network and demonstrate by empirical data that the small world search strategies using a contact's position in physical space or in an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to locate most individuals.
@cite_13
2147952642
We address the question of how participants in a small world experiment are able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about their immediate contacts. We simulate such experiments on a network of actual email contacts within an organization as well as on a student social networking website. On the email network we find that small world search strategies using a contact’s position in physical space or in an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to locate most individuals. However, we find that in the online student network, where the data is incomplete and hierarchical structures are not well defined, local search strategies are less effective. We compare our findings to recent theoretical hypotheses about underlying social structure that would enable these simple search strategies to succeed and discuss the implications to social software design.