Do you ever look at a stranger, someone in the street or on the internet, and wonder how many hookups separate the two of you? I do.

I’ve been wondering what a graph of the world sexual encounters would look like, a graph in which every person was a node and every sexual encounter was an edge. (And let’s be as broad and inclusive as possible in our definition of sexual encounter, I won’t try to state a thorough definition here but at the very least it should include mouth and hand stuff.)

My guess for the structure is that there would be a lot of disconnected nodes, a lot of two node components, a relatively low number of components slightly larger than two, and then one huge central component. That’s all speculation but I think it’s plausible.

If my assumptions were correct here are some things I’d love to know about this network:

  1. How large is the main component? What proportion of the nodes are within it?
  2. How large is the second largest component? And what’s the story of the people within it? Is there an isolated community that is internally connected but has had no sexual contact with the outside world? Or has another geographically diverse component formed in parallel with the main one?
  3. How large do components typically grow before being connected to the main one?