Quantifying Human Engagement into Playful Activities.

Engaging in playful activities, such as playing a musical instrument, learning a language, or performing sports, is a fundamental aspect of human life. We present a quantitative empirical analysis of the engagement dynamics into playful activities. We do so by analyzing the behavior of millions of players of casual video games and discover a scaling law governing the engagement dynamics. This power-law behavior is indicative of a multiplicative (i.e., "happy- get-happier") mechanism of engagement characterized by a set of critical exponents. We also find, depending on the critical exponents, that there is a phase transition between the standard case where all individuals eventually quit the activity and another phase where a finite fraction of individuals never abandon the activity. The behavior that we have uncovered in this work might not be restricted only to human interaction with videogames. Instead, we believe it reflects a more general and profound behavior of how humans become engaged in challenging activities with intrinsic rewards.

Emergence of coexisting percolating clusters in networks.

It is commonly assumed in percolation theories that at most one percolating cluster can exist in a network. We show that several coexisting percolating clusters (CPCs) can emerge in networks due to limited mixing, i.e., a finite and sufficiently small number of interlinks between network modules. We develop an approach called modular message passing (MMP) to describe and verify these observations. We demonstrate that the appearance of CPCs is an important source of inaccuracy in previously introduced percolation theories, such as the message passing (MP) approach, which is a state-of-the-art theory based on the belief propagation method. Moreover, we show that the MMP theory improves significantly over the predictions of MP for percolation on synthetic networks with limited mixing and also on several real-world networks. These findings have important implications for understanding the robustness of networks and in quantifying epidemic outbreaks in the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model of disease spread.

Quantifying randomness in real networks.

Represented as graphs, real networks are intricate combinations of order and disorder. Fixing some of the structural properties of network models to their values observed in real networks, many other properties appear as statistical consequences of these fixed observables, plus randomness in other respects. Here we employ the dk-series, a complete set of basic characteristics of the network structure, to study the statistical dependencies between different network properties. We consider six real networks--the Internet, US airport network, human protein interactions, technosocial web of trust, English word network, and an fMRI map of the human brain--and find that many important local and global structural properties of these networks are closely reproduced by dk-random graphs whose degree distributions, degree correlations and clustering are as in the corresponding real network. We discuss important conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of this evaluation of network randomness, and release software to generate dk-random graphs.

Deciphering the global organization of clustering in real complex networks.

We uncover the global organization of clustering in real complex networks. To this end, we ask whether triangles in real networks organize as in maximally random graphs with given degree and clustering distributions, or as in maximally ordered graph models where triangles are forced into modules. The answer comes by way of exploring m-core landscapes, where the m-core is defined, akin to the k-core, as the maximal subgraph with edges participating in at least m triangles. This property defines a set of nested subgraphs that, contrarily to k-cores, is able to distinguish between hierarchical and modular architectures. We find that the clustering organization in real networks is neither completely random nor ordered although, surprisingly, it is more random than modular. This supports the idea that the structure of real networks may in fact be the outcome of self-organized processes based on local optimization rules, in contrast to global optimization principles.

Clustering of random scale-free networks.

We derive the finite-size dependence of the clustering coefficient of scale-free random graphs generated by the configuration model with degree distribution exponent 2<γ<3. Degree heterogeneity increases the presence of triangles in the network up to levels that compare to those found in many real networks even for extremely large nets. We also find that for values of γ≈2, clustering is virtually size independent and, at the same time, becomes a de facto non-self-averaging topological property. This implies that a single-instance network is not representative of the ensemble even for very large network sizes.