Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Octopi


Keeping up with the marine theme, an octopus graph is similar to the jellyfish. This one is easier to define as it consists of a head, which is k-clique, and m tentacles of size t. The k-clique is a complete graph on k vertices and each of the tentacles is a path of length t. Note that for k=1 the octopus graph becomes a spider. These graphs occur in papers on neural networks and are of interest because of their large diameter and easy to parametrize density.