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Thinking about it some more, if you wanted this to be a silent dance, you can get 25 sticky name tags and label from 1 to 25 and put them on the backs of the dancers.

Offstage, you ask the dancers to:
  1. pick and remember a random number between 0 and their number. 
  2. flip a coin for each dancer and have them remember heads or tails
  3. as they enter the stage they find the dancer with their random number
  4. if they had tails, they connect to the dancer. If heads, they connect to the dancer the dancer is connected to



On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Stephen Guerin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I haven't tried this but you could implement the "link lottery" approach used by Netlogo and Agentscript with a participatory simulation:

Assuming 25 participants:
  1. Ahead of time, cut 24 pieces of 5-foot long elastic string (eg http://bit.ly/preferentialAttachmentString) and number the pieces from 1 to 24 with folded pieces of tape as a label
  2. Line up participants offstage and distribute the strings to the participants according to their position in line but skipping the first person (ie the second person gets string 1, third person string 2, etc...)
  3. Send the first two people onstage and ask them to hold string #1 between them
  4. Send the remaining people onstage one at a time, in order, and ask them to:
    1. call out a random number between 0 and the number on the string they are holding
    2. Ask the two people holding the string with the called-out number to play rock-paper-scissors (or other random selection method) and then have the winner raise their hand
    3. Ask the person entering the room to walk over to the winner and create a link by handing the winner the other end of the string the entering person just carried in with them.
Note:
  • As new links are added, you can ask the people in the growing network to try to space themselves out as much as possible and try to minimize string crossings.
  • If elastic string isn't available, you can use standard string - it just might be harder to layout
  • You could avoid using string altogether and just assign numbers to participants. As people enter the room, instead of handing one end of their string to the winner, they would simply reach out and hold onto the winner as a numbered directed link. This may be more closer to the dance / movement you're interested in.
  • You can see an example of the same algorithm at work with a circular layout at http://agentscript.org/models/prefattach.html.

-Stephen

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On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Dawn Parker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hello dear colleagues,

Do people have examples of crowd participation exercises that form power-law group distributions?

The backstory is, I'm doing a public lecture next week on using dance and movement to illustrate emergence in complex systems, using the example of power laws and specifically fractals.  

My English colleague found a great literary quote about people forming groups at a party, and we will also be presenting an urban growth model based on a modification of preferential attachment.  

We would like to do a group exercise, ideally based on the party idea, that would get people to form power law groups.

Any ideas?

Thanks so much!

Dawn

Dawn Cassandra Parker