Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematical-and-computational-biology-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2024/paper-1/d6/d/solution
Past exam of the mathematical and Computational Biology course of the University of Cambridge 2024 Paper 1 D6 d Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-20
The diagram has all possible undirected edges except : it is a complete graph on five vertices with one edge removed. Therefore and each have three neighbours, while each have four.
The neighbours of and form a triangle, so their clustering coefficients equal one. Each of has five of the six possible neighbour–neighbour edges, giving . The nodal average shortest path length is . All graph distances equal one except , henceAveraging the nodal quantities givesThe ordered-pair distance sum is , and the graph diameter is two.
If the intended unnormalized “small-worldness” is the ratio of clustering to path length, the computed quantities giveThat ratio has no universal threshold for identifying a small-world network. The standard reference-normalized small-worldness, , cannot receive a numerical value when no reference is specified and the question forbids using a network null model.[ref]
The graph has high clustering and short paths in the descriptive sense. With nine of ten possible edges, however, those properties follow directly from its near completeness; they do not by themselves establish small-world network structure relative to a reference. This distinguishes the metrics that can be computed directly from the stronger classification that requires a stated convention.
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