Twenty-five minutes
25:00
Nobody has heard yet.
Space starts and pauses. R resets. Nodes can be dragged, if that helps.
This is a pomodoro timer: twenty-five minutes, no more, no fewer.1 Press start, and one node in the network hears the news. The rest hear it from their neighbours, and their neighbours' neighbours, one at a time, until at zero everyone has heard. The spreading is timed to take exactly twenty-five minutes, and it is – for once – simple contagion.2 When the network is fully lit, you get up.
I have no opinion about what you do with the twenty-five minutes. I usually spend the first four of them getting ready to start.
- The original technique, by Francesco Cirillo, used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, hence the name. This one uses a random geometric graph. I did not have a tomato. ↩
- In real social networks, people are much more likely to pass something on after hearing it from several sources rather than one – so-called complex contagion, which we measured on Twitter in 2017. Here a single exposure is enough. Think of it as the spherical cow of social networks. ↩